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ๅœ‹็ซ‹่‡บ็ฃ็ง‘ๆŠ€ๅคงๅญธ ๅทฅๆฅญ็ฎก็†็ณป ็ขฉๅฃซๅญธไฝ่ซ–ๆ–‡ ๅญธ่™Ÿ๏ผš M10701849 ็”จๆ–ผ็™ผ้›ป้‡้ ๆธฌ็š„็ŸญๆœŸๅคช้™ฝ่ผป็…งๅบฆๅฏฆ็”จ ้ ๆธฌไน‹็ ”็ฉถ Pragmatic Short -Term Solar Irradiance Prediction for Power Generation Prediction ็ ” ็ฉถ ็”Ÿ๏ผšSiti Bariroh Maulidyawati ๆŒ‡ๅฐŽๆ•™ๆŽˆ๏ผš Shuo -Yan Chou ้ƒญไผฏๅ‹ณ ๅš ๅฃซไธญ่ฏๆฐ‘ๅœ‹ไธ€ไธ€้›ถๅนดไธ€ๆœˆ 2 3 4 ABSTRACT Owing to its essential contribution to the production of environmentally sustainable energy sources, the issue of renewables has captured the world's attention. Solar energy is one of the sources used to produce renewable energy.
Solar irradiation estimation is a critical component for renewable energy systems such as photovoltaic (PV) systems to be built. It may also help reduce energy costs and provide high energy quality in distributed solar photovoltaic generation electricity grids. Thus, this study aims to forecast one -step and multi -step solar irradiation ahead. The effect of weather conditions plays a significant role in helping to predict solar irradiation. Besides, much of the analysis focuses on minimizing the Mean Absolute Percentage Error. Yet, depending on the prediction model's reliability based on the error calculation and a closer look deep down into the data, there was still a weakness. This research's results are suggested scenarios to find a system based on the short -term horizon for forecasting solar irradiance. As the error target is below 8 percent, the error for solar irradianc e prediction is generally correct. The granularity of the prediction data affects the probability of error values being obtained by prediction. The classification used was based on the month in this report. The average of each month's prediction MAPE was 5 .8%. Proposing a pragmatic way in doing error analysis by comparing several error approaches and data volatility to deepen the analysis. Moving average proven could improve prediction accuracy because it may help capture the dramatic change of the data. In future research, more factors should be considered to capture hidden behaviour . Keywords : Solar Irradiance, Prediction, Short -term, Pragmatic Error Analysis 5 ACKNOWLEDGMENT Firstly, I would like to extend my sincerest gratitude to my advisor, Prof. Shuo -Yan Chou who has supported and guided me throughout my research and thesis.
His ideas, kindness, advice, and passion always inspire and motivate me to further enhance my work and achieve a great outcome. I would also like to acknowledge Prof. Po -Hsun Kuo and Prof. Tiffany Yu as my thesis defense committee for their encouragement, insightful comments, evaluation and suggestions for my research. I would also li ke to thank all my lab mates in Information Technology Application and Integration (ITAI) laboratory for their friendliness and support every single day during this past two years. Besides, I would also like to give tons of thanks to my dearest classmates, roommates, and friends that have been with me through my journey in NTUST. Furthermore, I must express my very profound gratitude to my family for providing me with unfailing support and continuous encouragement throughout my years of study and through the process of researching and writing this thesis. This accomplishment would not have been possible without them. Thank you. Last but not least, my deepest appreciation and praise goes out to Allah SWT, for letting me achieve another of my life accompli shments. Taipei, 26 January 2021 Siti Bariroh Maulidyawati 6 CONTENTS ABSTRACT ................................ ................................
.................... 14 2.4. Research on Solar Irradiance Prediction ................................ .............................. 15 3 CHAPTER 3 METHODOLOGY ................................ ................................ ................. 17 3.1 Pre-analysis Method ................................ ................................ ................................ 17 3.1.1. Data Visualization ................................ ................................
...................... 11 Figure 3.1 Research Framework ................................ ................................ .............................. 17 Figure 3.2 Framework Analysis Procedure ................................ ................................
................... 22 Figure 4.2 One -Minute Feature Correlation ................................ ................................ ............ 23 Figure 4.3 Feature Correlation 10 -minutes Granularity ................................ .......................... 24 Figure 4.4 Correlation Between Variable ................................ ................................
.................... 26 Figure 4.8 Auto -Correlation Solar Irradiance ................................ ................................ .......... 27 Figure 4.9 ANOVA Test Monthly Irradiance ................................ ................................ .......... 28 Figure 4.10 Monthly Irradiance Boxplot ................................ ................................ ................. 29 Figure 4.11 ANOVA Seasonal Irradiance ................................ ................................ ............... 29 Figure 4.12 Seasonal Irradiance Boxplot ................................ ................................
............................... 33 Figure 4.15 Percentage Error and Actual Irradiance Relationship ................................ .......... 34 Figure 4.16 Relationship between Absolute Error and Percentage Error ................................ 35 Figure 4.17 Pragmatic Error for Month of May ................................ ................................ ...... 37 Figure 4.18 A Closer Look into Mayโ€™s Data ................................ ................................ ........... 38 Figure 4.19 Captured Moving Average ................................ ................................
....................... 36 Table 4.6 Improvement Model Average Results ................................ ................................ ..... 39 Table 4.7 Moving Average Improvement in the Chance of Getting Error .............................. 39 9 1 CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION 1.1 Background According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), global renewable electricity capacity is projected to rise by over 1 TW, a 50% (1 220 GW) percent increase from 2018 to 202 4 [1]. Over half of this expansion is accounted for by s olar PV and dominates the production of renewable capacity . By 2025, Taiwan will use renewable energy to produce 20 percent of its electricity, a target endorsed by the Four -year Wind Power Promotion Plan and the Two -year Solar PV Promotion Plan. Within fi ve years, renewable energy capacity is projected to hit 26.9 gigawatts (GW) following these ventures [2]. In a global economy shaken deeply by COVID -19, short -term demand declines for fossil fuels, while renewables are estimated to grow slightly. The International Energy Agency (IEA) estimates that primary energy demand in 2020 could decline for oil ( โ€“9%), coal (โ€“8%), natural gas ( โ€“5%), and nuclear ( โ€“2%), while renewables would grow by 1% [3]. Solar PV plays the highest annual growth for Renewable Energy, it was also proven by the gradual increase between the yearโ€™s capacity. In 2019 it reached 627 gigawatts of world total [4]. Given the current solar PV growth scenario, the modern grid faces the above uncertainties in power generation. To compensate for the intermittent generation of PV, solutions exist to overcome this issue, such as energy storage [5]. Besides, knowing how much PV power would be produced could dramatically decrease the operating costs of power plants [6]. For the efficient integration of solar energy into the grid, accurate PV energy forecasting for different timescales (weekly, day -ahead, next hour, and intra -hour) is essential [7, 8] . [9] Solar PV produces energy that converts solar irradiance in to energy from sunlight โ€” weather parameters such as temperature influence PV systems' efficiency [10]. Therefore, PV power relies on solar irradiance and meteorological conditions, contributing to PV generation instability and uncertainty. This study aims to propose a real -time prediction model for the day ahead of the next hour and hour. The machine learning algorithms studied are long -short -term memory networks. The ana lysis uses historical weather data from a sensor located in Tainan, Taiwan, from the Central Weather Bureau. The period of the forecast focuses mainly on short -term forecasts. For 10 applications relevant to system operations, such as real -time dispatch, mark et clearing, and load following, short -term weather forecasting contributes beneficial. Besides, precise weather forecasts can also provide short -term energy trading and system balancing advantages. This contributes to increased grid stability and encourag es renewable energy resources to be used effectively. Moreover, reliable weather forecasts will allow renewable power generators to estimate production better and bid on day -to-day markets, reducing the penalties levied for discrepancies between real and s cheduled power generation. 1.2 Research Purpose The purposes of this research are: 1. Conducting one -step ahead and multistep -ahead solar irradiance prediction 2. Provide prediction error analysis in a pragmatic way 3. Suggest future expansion for solar irradiance prediction for solar power generation prediction 1.3 Research Limitations According to the background and research purpose above, here are the limitations of this research: 1. This research only focuses on solar irradiance prediction. 2. The prediction horizon focused on very short -term and short -term period. 3. The details of weather sensorโ€™s type and specification used are not analyzed . 1.4 Organisation of Thesis The framework of this research is explained in the following chapters. Chapter 1 is the background, obje ctives, limitations, and organization of the research. Chapter 2 presents the previous researches on renewable energy issues, solar energy issues , and solar irradiance prediction issues. Chapter 3 illustrates this research methodology and the particular me thod used for pre -processing method , prediction method , and research framework. Chapter 4 presents the result of the pre -analysis and data description, solar irradiance prediction, and error analysi s. Chapter 5 would wrap up the conclusion from all chapter s and also future research. Figure 1.1 below illustrates the organization of this thesis.
11 Figure 1.1 Organization of the Thesis 12 2 CHAPTER 2 LITERATURE REVIEW 2.1. Renewables Issues Recently, renewable energy has been the most resilient energy source to the Covid -19 lockdown measures. Renewable electricity has been mostly unaffected, while demand for other uses of renewable energy has declined. Global use of renewable energy in all sectors incr eased by about 1.5 percent in Q1 2020 compared with Q1 2019. Renewable electricity generation has increased by almost 3%, mainly due to the completion of new wind and solar PV projects over the past year and the fact that renewables are generally shipped b efore other electricity sources. In addition to the depressed demand for electricity, the power grids managed to increase wind and solar PV share. The use of renewable energy in biofuels decreased in Q1 2020 as the consumption of mixed fuels for road trans port decreased. Researchers estimate that the total global use of renewable energy increased by about 1% in 2020. Despite supply chain disruptions that have slowed or delayed activity in some key regions, the expansion of solar, wind, and hydropower is exp ected to help generate renewable electricity by almost 5% in 2020. However, this growth is smaller than expected before the Covid -19 crisis. Faster recovery would have a minimal impact on renewable energy production, although it would allow newer renewable -based projects to be completed. If the recovery is slower, renewable energy will continue to increase, making renewables the most resilient energy source to the current Covid - 19 crisis [3]. 2.2. Solar Energy Issues The use and production of renewable energy sources (RES) have been promoted by global warming and the critical depletion of fossil fuels in recent decades [6]. Not only have renewable energy sources such as solar, wind, hydropower, and geothermal energy been recognized as innovative solutions to the problems mentioned earlier, but they also represent the future of energy advancement [11]. Solar energy has emerged as the most common technique in replacing traditional sources and i s applied to many nations worldwide. The most promising source of power generation for residential, commercial, and industrial applications is solar energy [12]. Solar photovoltaic (PV) systems use PV cells that transform solar radiation into electric al energy [9]. Solar PV is used to su pply electricity for home appliances, lighting, and commercial and industrial equipment in stand -alone and grid -connected systems [13]. 13 The number and size of solar PV plants have increased worldwide due to their essential role in generating electricity [14]. In collaboration with the International Energy Agency (IEA), several nations are supposed to generate 196GW (in most grid -connected plants) by the end of 2015. An additional 40 nations excluded from the IEA Photovoltaic Power System Program (IEA PVPS) produced about 31GW of solar power. Solar PV installation for both IEA PVPS and other countries has increa sed dramatically from 2007 to 2015. About 70% of the solar PV installation came from IEA PVPS countries [15]. In early 2016, 120 solar PV plants with a capacity of more than 50MW operated in at least 23 countri es, i.e., the Philippines, Uruguay, Pakistan, Kazakhstan, Honduras, Guatemala, Denmark, and Australia [14]. The complicated existence of Renewable Energy Sources (RES) relies heavily on geographical locations and weather condi tions. It is becoming a significant challenge to incorporate large -scale RES into existing energy systems. Among other RES [16] tools, solar energy is a renewable fuel. Because of its electrical power capacity, solar PV plants' incorpora tion into power grids have gained a lot of attention. In smart grids, solar plants are used extensively. Implementation of large -scale grid -connected solar photovoltaic plants has shown major problems for power grids, such as system stability, reliability, energy balance, compensation of reactive power, and frequency response [9]. Forecasting solar photovoltaic power output has emerged as a great way of solving these problems. A primary factor that is efficient and cost -effective for large -scale integration of the traditional electricity grid is photovoltaic power forecasting [17]. Besides, photovoltaic (PV) power forecasting is essential for the restructuring and constructing large PV generating stations, stabilizing po wer systems, the green energy sector, and the alert of power disruption to self -governing power systems [18]. The prediction of power is also crucial for monitoring the power system's utilization, which helps to min imize the use of generating station reserve capacity by making the right unit commitment decisions [19]. It thus plays an essential role in reducing the cost of generating electricity and is useful for the grid's efficiency. A PV output power prediction error may harm the economic benefit of PV storage systems. At the same time, other influential vari ables affect the precision of prediction in prediction modelling. Solar radiance was one of the most critical variables [20, 21] . Accurate solar irradiance forecasting and, thus, the generation of PV power will reduce the effect of PV generation instability, boost the control algorithms of battery storage charge controllers, and offer significant economic benefits to PV storage systems [22]. 14 2.3. Solar Irradiance Prediction To reduce energy costs and provide high power quality for distributed solar photovoltaic generations in electricity grids, the prediction of solar i rradiance is essential [22]. For the design and evaluation of solar energy systems, c limate studies, water supplies control, estimating crop productivity, etc., solar irradiation is essential. In making the solar radiation prediction, accurate models can, therefore, be developed [21]. The stability of solar irradiation and its application is limited because of seasons, atmosphere, cloud density, and other climatic factors. The intrinsic characteristics of variability and ambiguity are solar radiance. Therefore, to overcome these uncertainties, resource planners must adjust during preparati on, which is of great importance for designing and managing solar power systems. Thus, forecasts of solar irradiance in the short term are highly critical [23]. 15 2.4. Research on Solar Irradiance Prediction Solar irradiance value is more challenging to impute, depen ding on whether time of days it was captured and the weather condition combination . The missing value is inevitable when collecting data from the sensor. Some imputation method has been tried to fill the missing value. However, the result of the graph also does not satisfy the accuracy of the prediction. As a result, LSTM Masking is use d in this research to no longer need missing -value imputation. Keras' masking layer is used to let the algorithm understand that time steps need to be ignored or skipped during the learning process. Ignoring it is safer than imputing it with the wrong beliefs. It is quite a challenge to predict solar irradiance with only a year's results. In essence, according to the prior clarification. Predicting solar irradiance can consist of many scenarios to see the highest precision for the forecast outcome . Four gra nularities have been used in this research method to recognize solar irradiance trends over time better. Comparison and analysis will also be discussed throughout these four granularities. The granularities are data of a minute, three minutes, five minutes , and ten minutes. The monthly forecasting scenario results in the best outcome, as the best scenario is selected from the scenarios explored . Moreover , the monthly irradiance forecasting scenarios will be conducted under scenario illustrated in Chapter 3. Table 2.1 Solar Irradiance Prediction Literature Review Title Granularity Features Method Dataset Improving time series prediction of solar irradiance after sunrise: Comparison among three methods for time series prediction [24] Measured 10 secondly, aggregated into hourly Solar irradiance, Delay information Kwasniok & Smith, barycentric coordinates, InDDeCs Chubu Electric Power Company (61 sites at the central region of Japan) Hourly day -ahead solar irradiance prediction using weather forecasts by LSTM [22] Hourly Temperature, dew point, humidity, visibility, wind Persistence, Linear Regression, BPNN, LSTM Solar power plant in island of Santiago, Cape Verde. 16 Title Granularity Features Method Dataset speed, weather type Deep solar radiation forecasting with convolutional neural network and long short -term memory network algorithms [25] 30 minutes Solar Irradiance CLSTM, LSTM, GRU, RNN, DNN, MLP, DT Global Solar Radiation dataset A Proposed Model to Forecast Hourly Global Solar Irradiation Based on Satellite Derived Data, Deep Learning and Machine Learning Approaches [26] Hourly Global Hourly Irradiance LSTM Sensor data from Al-Hoceima city, Morocco Solar radiation prediction using recurrent neural network and artificial neural network: A case study with comparisons [27] 10 minutes, 30 minutes, hourly Solar irradiance, air-dry bulb temperature, relative humi dity, dew point temperature, wind speed, wind direction Artificial Neural Network (ANN), Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) Local weather station in Alabama 17 3 CHAPTER 3 METHODOLOGY Figure 3.1 Research Framework The research aims to build scenarios of multistage solar irradiance prediction. Since most of the research has mentioned that solar irradiance has lin ear relationship with the solar power generation. Thus, it is important to predict the irradiance value so that it may help to improve the prediction accuracy. 3.1 Pre-analysis Method The pre -processing approach was carried out to gain insight that could be useful for further research or feedback for the prediction model. Visualization, ANOVA Test, Post -Hoc Test, and Correlation matrix consist of pre -analysis. Visualization is the traditional process but an efficient method to extract and explain the pattern of data. ANOVA, post -hoc test, statistical information, and Correlation matrix is vita l to see the correlation between features. Besides, the auto -correlation test also essential to get to know the sequence of the data. Irradiance has a complicated relationship with the weather situation, as mentioned in Chapter 2. Therefore, analysing the complicated relationship between each variable is crucial. The detail explanation of each pre -processing stages will be explained below. 18 3.1.1. Data Visualization The visualization is divided into two key components: the correlation of the individual characteristics and the correlation between them. The individual feature correlation of the weather variable and irradiance was performed to extract the time -series pat tern. Besides, it also will be used for prediction model consideration. Moreover, the extraction of interaction between features will be captured from the correlation visualization. Thus, the visualization, and the insight derived will be presented in Chap ter 4.1. to describe the data.
3.1.2. Auto -Correlation Test Auto -correlation tests are often carried out in the process of handling time -series data. Auto - correlation test performed to see the correlation of data in time (t) with its past -data (denoted as time lags x (t -1), x (t -2) and so on), a time window could be calculated. The magnitude of the correlation will be statistically calculated by the 95% confidence interval. The partial - autocorrelation also determining the correlation data ๐‘ฅ๐‘ก with its past data . The difference lies in the way partial -autocorrelation deleting the interference of the data. For example, when determining its correlation with ๐‘ฅ๐‘กโˆ’2 in the partial auto -correlation model, the model will try to delete the influence of the ๐‘ฅ๐‘กโˆ’1 and wh en determining the correlation with the ๐‘ฅ๐‘กโˆ’3, the model will try to delete the influence of the ๐‘ฅ๐‘กโˆ’2 and ๐‘ฅ๐‘กโˆ’1. In time -series data, the auto -correlation determination could help the next step decision. The autocorrelation result might help determine parameters in the prediction model. In this research, the auto -correlation would influence the decision in determining batch -size, tensor - data transformation shape, and output size. 1.1.3 ANOVA Test ANOVA test conducted to measure the significance of the influ encing factor statistically. ANOVA test described by Ronald A. Fisher [28]. In the experiment data, it is subjective to decide how far the difference so that a variable could be said as an influencing factor. ANOVA test designed to test the significance statistically. In the ANOVA test , the null hypothesis which states that the me ans between two groups of data or more is the same. The threshold used to determine the hypothesis is correct or not called p -Value or known as a statistical probability value. When p -Value is below the particular predefined alpha value , the null hypothesi s rejected [29]. 19 In conclusion , the means between two groups of data o r more is different significantly. In other words, the factor is influencing the response variable. In the experiment , the controlled variable stated as the factor , and the experiment result considered as the response variable. In this research , the confid ence interval used is 95% , then the alpha value would be 0.05. The response variable is the energy consumption , and the other variable identified to see its influence respect to energy consumption. In this research, the ANOVA test conducted in Minitab . 3.2 Prediction Method The prediction method is chosen to capture the time -series pattern of weather data, especially the irradiance feature. Building a robust and accurate prediction model always helps in terms of data -driven planning. Irradiance is always chall enging due to the high uncertainty in the pattern of weather combinations during the day. Hence, masking LSTM models will be tried to be utilized and will be tested in several scenarios to build prediction. At the end of this chapter, the moving average wa s used as an additional feature to improve the prediction's destructive results. 3.2.1. Masking Long -Short Term Memory (LSTM) Combining masking and LSTM is the algorithm used to forecast the prediction of wind speed. Weather data characteristics, especially irradiance, are highly uncertain.
The weather data collected by the sensor is inevitable, so the missing value . Since the irradiance data consists of a few missing values, filling out the missing value of the prediction is another problem since it will pro duce bias in the prediction results. Masking informs sequence -processing layers that there are missing those timesteps in the input and should therefore be skipped when processing the information. In general, with neural networks, it is safe to input missing values as 0, with the condition that 0 is not already a meaningful value. The network will learn from exposure to the data that the value 0 means missing data and will start ignoring the value. Meanwhile, if in the study expecting mi ssing values in the test data, but the network was trained on data without any missing values, the network wonโ€™t have learned to ignore missing values . In this situation, the researcher should artificially generate training samples with missing entries: co py some training samples several times, and drop some of the features that you expect are likely to be missing in the test data . 20 Thus, assigning zero to NaN elements will also considering that zero is not used in the data. The data can be normalized to a range, say [1,2], and then assign zero to NaN elements. Besides, alternatively, all the values also can be normalized to be in the range [0,1] and then use -1 instead of zero to replace NaN elements [30]. The second statement will be examined in this study . Combining the masking theory and LSTM is a suitable algorithm for the data, consisting of several missing values. Minimizing bias from missing values could be tackled by masking algorithm and LSTM to build predictions for irradiance with uncertainty and vo latile data. 3.3 Detailed Analysis Procedure As a means to create a systematic analysis, the prediction result analysis will be divided into several steps. Further details of each analysis stage will be examined in the Figure 3.2 below. Figure 3.2 Framework Analysis Procedure Here is the detail process from the framework analysis procedure above: โ€ข Irradiance prediction for each month and calculate the error In order to measure the prediction error, Mean Absolute Percentage Error (MAPE) and Mean Absolute Error (MAE) were utilized in this study. โ€ข Error visualization Scatter plot was used to pointed ou t the error visualization. The comparison between MAPE and MAE, also MAPE with actual data were aiming to find out why the error might happen in the data. 21 โ€ข Individual chance of getting error Average error of each month could not be only the representative o f the error in the specific month. Since the high actual data will be resulted in high value of absolute error, meanwhile, small actual value resulted in a higher percentage error. Thus, as the basic target in Taipower policy in energy prediction, further error exploration was done by calculating the chance of getting error below eight percent for each data points. โ€ข Pattern analysis Intending to get to know what lead the error caused in each data points, in this study, the plot relationship between true and predicted value of irradiance was examined. โ€ข Error toleration A pragmatic error analysis was examined to measure how far the erro r at each data points could be accommodated. โ€ข Model improvement Put the worst prediction as an example for doing model improvement, moving average was added as a feature of the prediction. โ€ข Multistep -ahead prediction Multistep -ahead prediction wa s conducted to get to know how well the model could work. 22 4. CHAPTER 4 RESULT AND DISCUSSION 4.1 Data Description The data used to analyze is weather data located at one of the weather stations from Central Weather Bureau of Taiwan located in Tainan City . Figure 4.1 The location of Data Source The variables gathered to support the analysis are presented in Table 4.1 below: Table 4.1 Data Collect ion Variable Name Source Explanation Unit of Measurement Taipei Minutely Weather Data Central Weather Bureau Taiwan Irradiance, Temperature, Relative Humidity, and Pressure ๐‘Š ๐‘š2,โ„ƒ,%, ๐‘Ž๐‘›๐‘‘ โ„Ž๐‘ƒ๐‘Ž Each variable was analyzed in month, season, and its relationship with each variable also will be analyzed for feature extraction before entering the model prediction . Due to the solar irradiance coming from the solar energy and it will only be appeared during the days, thus, in this study th e data for night time will be neglected. 23 4.1.1.
Feature Correlation One of the mechanisms for seeing the characteristics of the data is feature correlation. Input from the prediction method would be based on the predictor variable, which correlates positively with the expected value. The way to find the correlation between two or more variables may be done through many methods. Accessible data for all variables consists of one -minute granularity. In Tainan, Taiwan, the location of the weather sensor is. The tec hnical details of the sensor are not specified in the restrictions on the data. The correlation of the data to other variables is defined in the Figure 4.2 below. Figure 4.2 One-Minute Feature Correlation According to the graph above, the graphs showed that correlation is not shown clearly in the graph between irradiance and the weather condition (temperature, humidity, pressure) . It was 24 because in the minutely data, the variance of the data was small since the gap was so short. The pattern in the Figure 4.2 could not represents the pattern of the relationship between variable. Hence, in this study, the data will be aggregated into three minutes, five minutes and ten minutes. However, for the feature correlation will be visualized in ten minutely granularity can be seen in the Figure 4.3 below. Figure 4.3 Feature Correlation 10 -minutes Granularity According to the figure above it can be seen that the shape of relationship between variable was improved. Nonetheless, though the pattern already improved, the contact among the feature still could not see clearly. Thus, another approach needed to be examined to capture t he relationship. 25 The correlation of each variable to solar irradiance described in Figure 4.4 below. Figure 4.4 Correlation Between Variable Pearson correlation was used because the data value of each variable was continuous. Based on the correlation matrix above, it can be seen that the positive correlation to the solar irradiance only hold by the temperature. Besi des, humidity and pressure also have correlation to solar irradiance, but the relationship was negative. It was because they were not directly affecting the irradiance value. Figure 4.5 Factors Affecting Solar Irradiance The figure above depicted that the most affected factor of solar irradiance value was the clearness index of the sky condition [31]. In addition, the clearness index was affected by the temperature a nd cloud amounts at the specific time of day. As described in the figure, pressure and humidity [32] wasnโ€™t as close as temperature in affecting the irradiance value. 26 Figure 4.6 ANOVA Test between Variables Figure 4.6 depicted the correlation between each prediction variables. It showed that all o f the variable has p -value 0.000 which is below 0.05 and it means that all of them significantly affecting the solar irradiance value. In addition, according to the description of the data correlation and ANOVA test, further statistical approaches were con ducted to convince the relationship of irradiance with other prediction variable using regression equation. The result will be shown in the figure below. Figure 4.7 Regression Equation Result Figure 4.7 showed the similar relationship with what been mentioned in Figure 4.4 and Figure 4.5. It can be seen that at both results performed, the positive influenced of temperature and pressure. However, humidity showed the negative influence of irra diation. Since the regression will only capture the linear correlation, thus, the pressure showed a positive value. However, theoretically pressure has the negative correlation with the irradiance. It was because pressure does not directly affect irradianc e. It has an opposing relationship with temperature which has the direct relation with the solar irradiance.
4.1.2. Autocorrelation Auto -correlation is a way to find the required time -lag configuration in the prediction model's parameter settings. To find out th e explicit dependency, time series analysis requires auto - correlation analysis. The effects of auto -correlation have been used to extend independent 27 variables to predict the generation of electricity. Furthermore, the extraction of time series dependencies assists in further steps of data processing. Besides, results from auto -correlation may be used to work out the tuning parameter. Here is the auto -correlation result from four variables. Figure 4.8 Auto -Correlation Solar Irradiance According to the figure above, the ACF analysis shows that the data's auto -correlation with previous data points is strongly correlated even it is already reached the 60th data points with confident interval of 95 percent. Thus, previous data points correlate closely with the next data points based on the auto -correlation analysis. In short, to predict the upcoming data points, the time minus specific previous data points are considered as a new variable. The further explanation will be showed in the Table 4.2 below. Table 4.2 Time -Lag Configuration According to the Figure 4.5 from the CWB database that has been collected, there were four variables can be used for predicting the irradiance value. Th en, from the mentioned variable, further exploration needs to be done in order to define the time lag of prediction. Since 28 Figure 4.8, the data still ha s a relationship to each other until 60th data, the individual variable was examined how often the data change between the time. The data observation found several changes and will be considered for creating the scenario. Table 4.2 showed several time lag scenarios. From fifth scenarios, the third scenario with combination t -10 irradiance, t -6&t temperature, t -3&t humidity, and t -10&t pressure outperformed the other scenario within chance of getting MAPE below 8 percent 88.57 percen t. 4.2 Prediction Results 4.2.1. Grouping Analysis The data used in this forecast is a year with minute granularity data from September 2019 to September 2020. Besides, depending on environmental conditions and time of day, the irradiance value is high. Meanwhile, t here are distinct weather characteristics in various regions, periods, and seasons. In terms of averages and range, the figure below shows how was the monthly influences for irradiance values . Figure 4.9 ANOVA Test Monthly Irradiance The monthly solar irradiance varies significantly based on a p -value < 0.05, according to the statistical analysis of the variance analysis for the monthly irradiance results. The ANOVA test was carried out to emphasize that the grouping method's effects based on the month differ significantly, hence, that pattern and data characteristics vary every month. As each month's data characteristics are substantially different, the prediction model will be evaluated for each month. 29 The figure below shows the interval plot for a year data . Figure 4.10 Monthly Irradiance Boxplot The grouping based on the average irradiance within a year will help predict irradiance by the model capability. On the other hand, looking at the average irradiance in a year, the seasonal grouping influenced examined in the Figure 4.11 below. Figure 4.11 ANOVA Seasonal Irradiance The above figure clarified that the ANOVA test results were substantially d ifferent based on time-slicing classification, which corresponds to a p -value of less than 0.05. In the boxplot below the speediness of the data will be discussed further . 30 Figure 4.12 Seasonal Irradiance Boxplot In the Figure 4.12 above, it can be seen that there was inconsistency in the data representative. Though the ANOVA result showed p -value < 0.05 which means there is a difference between the monthly data characteristic, however the boxplot showing us otherwise. The Autumn and Spring plot showed similar boxplot pattern. To sum up , the grouping may help to improve the accuracy of prediction performa nce. Basically , to explain the data pattern, homogeneous data may become a simpler model. Characteristics of irradiance value grouping data for each month are already evaluated to see each month's similarity . In addition, monthly grouping showed better performance. Thus, in this research monthly grouping will be examined for batching the prediction. 4.2.2. Solar Irradiance Prediction Before entering the prediction explanation, in this study, there are four -time granularity that will be considered; minutely, three minutely, five minutely, and ten minutely. According to the Figure 4.2, one minutely data could not capture the data pattern wisely. It was because the 31 variance of the data was small and may resulting in a bigger prediction error. The figure below will show four different gran ularityโ€™s data patterns. Figure 4.13 Data Pattern for Different Granularity According to the Figure 4.13, three minutely data still could not capture the data pattern enough. Moreover, due to the data used in this study was coming from CWB of Taiwan, thus some of Taiwan energy policy will be cons idered . Based on the Taipower energy policy for energy dispatching, it was important in knowing the supply demand change between five minutes until fifteen minutes. Thus, five minutely and ten minutely granularity will be considered in this study. Fifteen minutely will not be included because the data become further than two previous granularities. Meanwhile, three minutely was considered to capture smaller granularity because there was still limited information howโ€™s smaller granularity works in solar irradiance prediction. 32 Here is the data separation for predicting solar irradiance showed in the Table 4.3 below. Training set was the data input for the m odelling, due to the default parameter usage, in this study, the training data already cover the validation data. Moreover, the testing data will be used to test the prediction model that already built during the training phase. Table 4.3 Parameter Setting Training Set Testing Set 1st โ€“ 26th day of each month 27th and the rest of each month The Table 4.4 showed the summary result of the prediction for different time horizon. Table 4.4 MAPE Result Summary According to the prediction result above, it can be seen that the best result in term of MAPE was belong to the ten minutely granularity. However, this could not be the only parameter of measuring how good or how bad a prediction was. Thus, in the figure Figure 4.15 and Figure 4.16 will examine a further error analysis by capturing the visualization between percentage error (PE), absolute error (AE), and actual value of solar irradiance data. In the scatterplot, the blue colour represents the PE value above eight percent, and the pink colour represents the PE value below 8 percent. 33 According to the Figure 4.14 above, it can be seen that there was a bias of the prediction error. Though the data already got the small absolute error, the percentage error was high, and vice versa. In addition, the small actual data has a big potential in resulting higher value of percentage error. Besides, the big actual irradiance value has more chance in getting higher value of absolute error. Figure 4.14 Bias Error Analysis PE = 116.3% AE = 3.23 Irr = 2.8 PE = 9.4% AE = 10.44 Irr = 111.11 Percentage Error Absolute Error 34 Figure 4.15 Percentage Error and Actual Irradiance Relationship The Figure 4.15 showed overall months of rel ationship between PE and actual value of solar irradiance. It can be seen that for all the months, the smaller value of solar irradiance resulted in higher percentage error. In addition, here is another visualization in the Figure 4.16 below will examine the relationship between absolute error and percentage error. It also showed that the data which having the high percentage error might showing a small absolute error an d vice versa. 35 Figure 4.16 Relationship between Absolute Error and Percentage Error The fact of percentage error and absolute error above showed that there was a bias of error. Thus, both error measuremen t could not capture the overall error. In this case, a further error analysis will be examined to get to know the deepen analysis of the data. 36 On the other hand, Table 4.5 Chance of Error Summary below shows the summary of each month prediction result for minutely, three, five, and ten minutely granularity. Table 4.5 Chance of Error Summary Table 4.5 depicted that compared to the other granularity, ten minutely granularity showed the best chance in getting prediction error below 8 percent; both for average and for each month of the year. Besides, there is a decrement percentage in chance of getting MAPE below eight percent from one minute to three minutes data. However, from three minutes to five minutes and five minutes to ten minutes there were an increment. The possibility of getting error for each data was really affected by the data pattern and variance of the data. Thus, due to ten minutes already outperformed the other month, in this study ten minutely granularity will be used for further analysis. In addition, according to the Table 4.4 Table 4.5, the worst chance of error performance belon gs to May. Hence, the further analysis will be more focused in the month of May to get to find a proposed approach in improving the prediction model. 37 The Figure 4.17 below shows the pragmatic way of error toleration in the month of May. Figure 4.17 Pragmatic Error for Month of May In the figure above, the average percentage error of less than eight percent is 2.02 percent, and the absolute error of 2.02 percent is 2.45 absolute error. Also, the value of the position of 2.45 absolute error for solar irradiance is 80 W/m2. Thus, in the ignorer's rectangle, the error boundary, which represents the bias calculation, shows. The percentage error appears to get significant values because the true value of solar irradiance was small; however, it is suggested that the data might ignore the points in that region โ€”another boundary analysis of the greater irradia nce as an actual value, which is over 80 W/m2. The maximum power generation location is 160 W/m2 under 8 percent error still acknowledged, other than another value might find another point as a boundary in the 16 percent error for smaller value. Overall, t he chance of getting error in the month of May was 2.205 percent. Thus , the points are still under control under the line boundary. 38 In the Figure 4.18 below shows the pattern of actual irradiance value, prediction value, and the percentage error. Figure 4.18 A Closer Look into Mayโ€™s Data After looking at the figure above, it can be seen in the upper graph that when there is a dramatic change on the actual data, it will be affecting the percentage error of the prediction. In addition, during the month of May, the data was quite dramatic in change between each data point. Thus, the cyclic of data patter n in the month of May will captured by the moving average analysis. Some of centred moving average time series was examined within Minitab software. However, the most suitable pattern was drawn by the centred moving average three with error rate of MAPE 6 .58 percent. The Figure 4.19 will describe the mentioned pattern. Figure 4.19 Captured Moving Average 39 From the figure above, it can be seen that the pattern of the centred moving average three could capture the pattern of the data points. Thus, the improvement for prediction model will considering the moving average result as a predicted variable. The Table 4.6 below will show the average result for each time granularity MAPE improvement. Table 4.6 Improvement Model Average Results According to the table above, it can be seen that in all granularity the model could improve the MAPE result. It means that the addition centred moving average as a feature has significant influenced in the MAPE improvement. Moreover, in this following table the chance of each data poi nt in getting error below eight percent will be examined. Table 4.7 Moving Average Improvement in the Chance of Getting Error Based on the Table 4.7 above showed that there is an essential improvement after adding centred moving average as a predictor variable. It can be seen that at all of the granularity increased the percentage of the chance in getting error from less than one percent until less th an eight percent. Furthermore, for five- and ten -minutes granularity can reach 100 percent starting from chance of getting error below five percent. It means that the MAPE for all data point in the month of May in five and ten minutely data were less than five percent percentage error. 40 4.2.3. Multistep -Ahead Prediction The prediction model used in this study will be tested to see the capability in predicting the multistep -ahead data for each month. The granularity used in this data was ten minutely due to the re ason that already mentioned in the previous analysis. In the Figure 4.20 below the result of multistep -ahead prediction was shown for further analysis. Figure 4.20 Multistep -Ahead Prediction Result According to the figure above, it can be seen that the prediction model can work on the multistep -ahead prediction. It showed on the Figure 4.20 that some of the error still below eight percent for some timesteps in some month. However, if looking at detailed orientation of the result , it depicted that the multistep -ahead prediction could not perform well in the month of May, November, and December. It described in the graph that at all of the timesteps the prediction result was exceeded the eight percent of MAPE. Besides, for the othe r month, the model still can perform well at least until the third timestep. Even in March it might performed well in all of the timesteps. In order to the result for the multistep -ahead prediction, the future result may consider additional feature in cap turing the data such as moving average or another time series approach analysis. In addition, the configuration of the prediction model could be explored more. Adding some promising feature as mentioned in the Figure 4.5 can be considerate. 41 5 CHAPTER 5 CONCLUSION AND FUTURE RESEARCH Comparing four different granularities (one, three, five, and ten minutely), the ten minutes shows better accuracy both for average and the chance of getting an error below eight percent . In minutely granularity, the variation of irradiance data was small, yet the other variable is not. Thus, aggregating the data improves the prediction model in capturing the data. On the other hand, a month with more significant irradiance ranges, as validated by the standard deviation, is more difficult to predict. The dramatic change between each data points also leads to a more significant percentage error of prediction. To sum up, each month's solar irradiance prediction depicted that the error is relatively small, with an average of 5.8%. However, the error of 5.8% comes from MAPE computation, which produced biased caused the actual value of the data is minimal. The most e xcellent accuracy was performed in October, with the chance of getting an error below 8 percent to exceed 99 percent. Meanwhile, the worst one was shown in May with only cover about 68 percent. Dramatic change between data points have a huge influence on t he prediction accuracy. Thus, moving average addition in the variable prediction was applied in May data. The result shows that it could accommodate all of the data to get an error below 8 percent. In order t o see the reliability of the prediction model, a nother error study is also recommended. The entire state of the findings c ould not be captured by MAPE. Proposing a closer look review of errors may assist the stakeholder from other points of view to see detailed errors. This study looks at the absolute e rror (AE) and the gap between data points. AE and the distance between data points are investigated in this research. Multistep -ahead prediction also conducted in this study to check the prediction model performance. The result convinced that it may work w ell at least until thirty minutes ahead prediction . Furthermore, model improvement is needed to accommodate the multistep -ahead prediction Due to the limited variables in the database of this study. For future research, it would be better weather predictio n data could be provided from the trusted sources. Thus, it could be considered to capture data more deepen for prediction. Moreover, another variable such as sky condition, sky images, cloud motion, and meteorological forecast might help capture another hidden behavior. The detailed proposed will be described in the Figure 5.1 below. 42 Figure 5.1 Future Research Proposed Framework To sum up, the contribution of this research would like to emphasize more the evaluation of MAPE performance in term of prediction result measurement and the time lag configuration . In addition, this study also proposed a pragmatic way of error analysis. 43 REFERENCES [1] "Renewables 2019." International Energy Agency. https://www.iea.org/reports/renewables -2019/power (accessed November 30, 2020). [2] "Taiwan to boost renewable energy to 20% by 2025, introduc e trillion -dollar investment." Taiwan News. https://www.taiwannews.com.tw/en/news/3880997 (accessed December 1, 2020). [3] "Global Energy Outlook: ," in "Energy Transition or Energy Addition?," Resources for the Future, 2020. [Online]. Available: www.eef.org/geo [4] "Renewables 2020 Global Status Report," REN 21, 2020. [Online].
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I. PVPS, "TRENDS 2016 IN PHOTOVOLTAIC APPLICATIONS," 2016. [16] S. F. Giorgio Graditi, Giovanna Ad inolfi, Giuseppe Marco Tina, Cristina Ventura, "Energy yield estimation of thin -film photovoltaic plants by using physical approach and artificial neural networks," Solar Energy, vol. 130, pp.
ๅœ‹็ซ‹่‡บ็ฃ็ง‘ๆŠ€ๅคงๅญธ ๅทฅๆฅญ็ฎก็†็ณป ็ขฉๅฃซๅญธไฝ่ซ–ๆ–‡ ๅญธ่™Ÿ๏ผšM10801866 ๅ†็”Ÿ่ƒฝๆบ้ ๆธฌไธ็ขบๅฎšๆ€งๆ–ผๅ‡บๅƒนๅธ‚ๅ ดไธญไน‹ ๅ„ฒ่ƒฝๅฎน้‡่ฃœๅ„Ÿๆธฌๅฎš Battery capacity determination for the compensation of renewable energy forecast uncertainty in a bidding -based power market ็ ” ็ฉถ ็”Ÿ๏ผšDavid Wacker ๆŒ‡ๅฐŽๆ•™ๆŽˆ๏ผšๅ‘จ็ขฉๅฝฅ ไธญ่ฏๆฐ‘ๅœ‹ไธ€ไธ€้›ถๅนดไธƒๆœˆ ๆ‘˜่ฆ ๅฏๅ†็”Ÿ่ƒฝๆบ่ขซ่ช็‚บๆ˜ฏๆ‡‰ๅฐๅ…จ็ƒๆš–ๅŒ– ๅŠๅ…ถๅพŒๆžœ็š„ๆœ€้‡่ฆ่ƒฝๆบไน‹ไธ€ใ€‚็„ก่ซ–ๅฎƒ ๅ€‘็š„ๆฝ›ๅŠ›ๅฆ‚ไฝ•๏ผŒๅœจๅฎƒๅ€‘ๅฎŒๅ…จๅ–ไปฃๅ‚ณ็ตฑ็š„็™ผ้›ปๆ–นๅผๅŒ…ๆ‹ฌ็…ค็‚ญใ€ๅคฉ็„ถๆฐฃๅ’Œๆ ธ้›ปๅป ไน‹ ๅ‰๏ผŒๅฎƒๅ€‘้ƒฝไผด้šจ่‘—ไธ€็ณปๅˆ—็š„ๆŒ‘ๆˆฐใ€‚ๅ…ถไธญไธ€ๅ€‹ๅ•้กŒๆ˜ฏ๏ผŒๅคช้™ฝ่ƒฝๅ’Œ้ขจ่ƒฝ้ƒฝไธๆ˜ฏๆŒ‰้œ€ ๆฑ‚ๆไพ›็š„๏ผŒ่€Œๆ˜ฏๅ–ๆฑบๆ–ผ็•ถไธ‹็š„ๅคฉๆฐฃ๏ผŒไฝ†ๆ˜ฏ็‚บไบ†็ขบไฟ้›ป็ถฒ็ฉฉๅฎš๏ผŒ้œ€ๆฑ‚ๅ’Œไพ›ๆ‡‰็ธฝๆ˜ฏ ๅฟ…้ ˆๅŒน้…๏ผŒ้€™ๅฐฑ่ฆๆฑ‚้›ป็ถฒ้‹็‡Ÿๅ•†ๆๅ‰็Ÿฅ้“ๅฏ็”จ็š„้›ป้‡ใ€‚้€™้ …็ ”็ฉถๆๅ‡บไบ†ไธ€ๅ€‹ๅฏฆ ็”จ็š„่งฃๆฑบๆ–นๆกˆ๏ผŒๅฎƒๅฏไปฅๅˆฉ็”จ้›ปๆฑ ๅ„ฒ่ƒฝๆๅ‰็ขบๅฎš็™ผ้›ป้‡๏ผŒ่€Œไธ”ๅœจ็•ถๅ‰็š„ๆŠ€่ก“ๅ’Œๅธ‚ ๅ ดๆฉŸๅˆถๆ–น้ขไนŸ้ฉ็”จใ€‚็ ”็ฉถ่กจๆ˜Ž๏ผŒๅฐ‡ๅคšๅ€‹ๅคช้™ฝ่ƒฝ็™ผ้›ป็ณป็ตฑ่ฆ–็‚บไธ€ๅ€‹ๅ–ฎไธ€็š„็ต„ๆˆ๏ผŒ ๅฏไปฅๆ้ซ˜้ ๆธฌ็š„ๅนณๅ‡็ฒพๅบฆใ€่ชคๅทฎๅˆ†ไฝˆไธฆๆธ›ๅฐ‘้ ๆธฌไธญ็š„็•ฐๅธธๅ€ผใ€‚้€™ๅ้Žไพ†ๅˆๅฐŽ่‡ด ไบ†ๅฐ่ชคๅทฎๆ‰€้œ€็š„่ฃœๅ„Ÿ้œ€ๆฑ‚ๆธ›ๅฐ‘ใ€‚ๅˆฉ็”จ้€™็จฎๆง‹ๆˆ๏ผŒๆญค็ ”็ฉถๆๅ‡บไบ†ไธ€็จฎๅŸบๆ–ผๆจกๆ“ฌๆฑบ ๅฎš้›ปๆฑ ๅฎน้‡็š„ๆ–นๆณ•ใ€‚่ฉฒๆ–นๆณ•่€ƒๆ…ฎไบ†็ทฉ่กๅ€ใ€่ฝ‰ๆ›ๆๅคฑใ€ๅพช็’ฐๅฃฝๅ‘ฝใ€ๆœ€ๅคงๆ”พ้›ปๆทฑ ๅบฆๅ’Œ่‡ชๆ”พ้›ปใ€‚ๅ…ถ็ตๆžœๆ˜ฏๅฐๆ‰€้œ€้›ปๆฑ ๅฎน้‡็š„ไผฐ่จˆไปฅๅฎŒๅ…จ่ฃœๅ„Ÿไปปไฝ•้ ๆธฌ้Œฏ่ชค๏ผŒๅŒ…ๆ‹ฌ ๅ„ชๅŒ–้›ปๆฑ ๆ“ไฝœ็š„้›ปๆฑ ็ฎก็†ๆ”ฟ็ญ–ใ€‚ ้—œ้ต่ฉžใ€‚้›ปๆฑ ๅญ˜ๅ„ฒ็ณป็ตฑ๏ผŒๅฎน้‡่ฆๅŠƒ๏ผŒ้ ๆธฌ๏ผŒ้–“ๆญ‡ๆ€ง่ฃœๅ„Ÿ๏ผŒๅฏๅ†็”ŸAbstract Renewable Energy is regarded as one of the most important ways to combat global warming and its conse quences. No matter their potential they come with a series of challenges that need to be address ed before they are ready to fully replace the traditional means of power production, which nowadays mainly consists of coal , gas and nuclear power plants.
One o f these issues is that both solar and wind energy are not available on demand but rather depend on the current weathe r. But to ensure grid stability demand and supply always must be matched , which requires the grid operator to known the available amount of power ahead of time. This research propose s a practical solution, which allows to reliably determine power production ahead of time utilizing battery storage and that is also applicable under current circumstances in regards to technology and market mecha nisms . The research shows how considering multiple solar power systems as a single composition can improve a forecastโ€™s average accuracy, error distribution and reduce the occurrence of outliers in the prediction. This in turn leads to a reduced need for c apacity to compensate for made errors.
Using the composition, a simulation -based approach on determining storage capacity is presented. The approach considers buffers, conversion losses, cycle life, maximum depth of discharge and self -discharge. The result is an estimate for required battery capacity to fully compensate any forecast errors made including a battery management policy for optimized battery operation. Keywords: Battery Storage Systems, Capacity Planning, Forecasting, Intermittency Compensation, Renewable EnergyAcknowledgement First and foremost, I would like to express my gratitude to my advisor Prof. Shou -Yan Chou for his continuous support and guidance.
Without a doubt this sharing of wisdom is the most significant source of motivation for me . Further I w ould like to thank the other committee member of my Thesis: Prof. Po-Hsun Kuo, and Prof. Loke Kar Seng, for their insightful comments and questions that elevate the contents of my writing. Also, I thank my fellow labmates at the Information Technology Application and Integration (ITAI) laboratory and fellow students at the National Taiwan University of Science and Technology (NTUST). The y provided insightful discussion and even more important a comfortable and joyful stay for me so far from home. Lastly, I am thankful and consider myself of utmost luck to have the parents I do, that always assist me in reaching my dreams and provide me with the opportunity to study in Taiwan so far from home . The experience o f a country so different in culture from my own, made me reflect on life and taught me to see everything from more than one perspective. David Wacker Taipei , July 20 21 Table of Contents List of Tables ................................
65 Appendix 1. Forecast Composition โ€“ MAPE Distributions ................................ ......... 68 Appendix 2. Forecast Composition โ€“ Maxim um PE Distribution ............................... 70 Appendix 3. Forecast Composition โ€“ Share PE over 5% ................................ ............
.. 54 Table 4: Forecast Composition โ€“ MAPE Distributions ................................ ............... 68 Table 5: Forecast Composition โ€“ Maximum PE Distributions ................................ .... 70 Table 6: Forecast Compos ition โ€“ Distribution of PE over 5% ................................ .... 72 List of Figures Figure 1: Worldwide Power Generation [(EIA) 2019] ................................ ................ 13 Figure 2: Worldwide Power Generation from Renewable Sources [(EIA) 2019] ....... 14 Figure 3: Energy Storage Technologies [Das, Bass et al. 2018] ................................
.. 42 Figure 9: Cumulative Error over Time (Adjusted data) ................................ ............... 43 Figure 10: Forecast Composition โ€“ Percentage Error Progression .............................. 44 Figure 11: Forecast Composition โ€“ Maximum Percentage Error Progression ............ 46 Figure 12: Forecast Composition - PE Distribution Progression ................................ . 47 Figure 13: Forecast Composition - PE Distribution Progression (11 onwards) .......... 47 Figure 14: Simulated Battery Load (Tesla Powerwall 2) ................................ ............ 52 Figure 15: Simulated Battery Load (sonnen eco) ................................ ........................ 53 Figure 16: Power Forecast of Station 1 - Inverter 7 ................................ ...................... 56 Figure 17: Power Forecast Composition ................................ ................................
...... 56 Nomenclature ๐ธ๐‘ก Energy stored in BESS at time ๐‘ก ๐ต๐ธ๐‘†๐‘† ๐‘๐‘Ž๐‘ Storage Capacity ๐›ฟ๐ท๐‘œ๐ท Maximum depth of discharge (%) ๐‘ƒ๐‘๐‘ก Power charged at time ๐‘ก ๐‘ƒ๐‘‘๐‘ก Power discharged at time ๐‘ก ๐œ‚๐‘ Charging efficiency ๐œ‚๐‘‘ Discharging efficiency ๐ด๐‘ก Actual Power at time ๐‘ก ๐น๐‘ก Forecasted Power at time ๐‘ก ๐œ๐‘†๐ท Self-Discharge factor of BESS ๐ถ๐ฟ Desired Cycle Life ๐ฟ๐‘–๐‘š ๐‘ข๐‘ Upper Limit of BESS ๐ฟ๐‘–๐‘š ๐‘™๐‘œ๐‘ค Lower Limit of BESS ๐›ฝ Buffer size (%) ๐›ผ Adjustment factor Introduction 12 1. Introduction Due to the rising g lobal temperature s and the potential severity of problems connected with it, in 2006 the Paris Agreement was signed with the aim of holding the increase of global average temperatures below 2ยฐC.
One of the measurements to be taken is the significant reduction or even complete elimination of greenhouse gases . As production of electricity with fossil fuels is one of the main contributors to CO 2- emission [Boden, Marland et al. 2009] , production from renew able energy sources have come into focus . Most countries set a specific target for their renewable energy production, many of them even 100% electricity generation from renewable sources by 2050 or even earlier [Parliament 2018] . As seen in Figure 1, power generation is continually rising in response to global development. While the absolute amount of both power from fossil and renewables has increased, the relative share of renewable energy is continuously increasing, from 20% in 2000 to 27% in 2018. Note that share of fossil fuels has remained more or less constant in that time and it is instead nuclear power which relative share has been decreased. Introduction 13 Figure 1: Worldwide Power Gene ration [(EIA) 2019] This substantial increase in power from renewable ene rgy sources is predominately carried by wind and solar as seen Figure 2 below. Hydroelectricity is still the major source of renewable energy but itโ€™s relative share has decreased from 91% in 2000 to just 62% in 2018. Power generat ion from solar and wind has increased from about 1% for both to 9% and 19%, respectively within the same time. This does lead to new challenges in ensur ing power grid stability and consumer s on-demand access to power , as all pow er demand must be met with the equal amount of supply. Beyond that also the opposite is true, all supply must be met with demand, or in other words produced electricity must be consumed. This is because power transmission lines are not able to store power , any power inserted must also be retrieved. 050001000015000200002500030000 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017 2018Power Generation Worldwide Nuclear (billion kWh) Fossil fuels (billion kWh) Renewables (billion kWh)Introduction 14 Figure 2: Worldwide Power Generation from Renewable Sources [(EIA) 2019] One option to achieve this balance is building up storage systems that allow to store power when supply exceeds demand and provide this excess when demand surpass supply . Another option are systems like smart gr ids, virtual power plants or auto-DR programs, which all fill a similar role. The idea is to utilize a plethora of sensor and meters to automatically control power generation sources and demand devices to keep up the equilibrium [Shabanzadeh and Moghaddam 2013] . These cases are especially interesting in a grid that operates solely on renewable energy (RE). Currently though most grids in the world still have a mix of power production. To ease the integration, power supply from renewable energy sources (RES) can be made p lannable when used in conjunction with storage system. 010002000300040005000600070008000 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017 2018Power Generation from Renewable Sources Hydroelectricity (billion kWh) Geothermal (billion kWh) Tide and wave (billion kWh) Solar (billion kWh) Wind (billion kWh) Biomass and waste (billion kWh)Introduction 15 1.1. Research Goal The central goal of this research is to provide a practical solution that reduces the difficulties associated with the integration of RE into power grid under current circumstances in re gards to technology and market mechanisms. More clearly the benefits should affect and ease the grid operatorโ€™s task of balancing the power grid , by reducing or even eliminating the uncertainty of RE production, which in turn reduces the need for power res erve as well as cost . As a result, this hopefully leads to sooner large -scale adoption of RE . Not just because associated cost is reduced but primarily because the existing power reserve in some gird might not be sufficient to add significant shares of RES into the grid. The provided solution is an approach to determine minimum battery capacity in such a way that any forecast error can be compensat ed trough the battery, making the forecast indirectly fully reliable. In practice suppliers of RE can utilize t his approach to plan small scale BESS capacity. The premise is that power committed to the grid operator ahead of times can be always delivered at any point in time with minimum capacity of the battery and therefore minimizing investment cost. Followingly the individual relevant parts of the goal are addressed to specify target and scope of this research , as well as to elaborate the relevant background in detail . 1.1.1. Power Bidding Market & Grid Balancing Understanding how power is balanced within a grid and the dynamics of the electricity market is essential to understand why renewable energy is so difficult to integrate into currently existing grid and why even a supposedly small percentage has a substantial effect on the rest of the market. While in detail thi s far more complex then Introduction 16 followingly explained, the fundamental mechanisms are essential to the underlying idea of the research. In a privatized power bidding market, the grid operator buys power off independent suppliers . The grid operator estimates the p ower consumption ahead of time. Subsequently the suppliers offer set amount units of power for a certain time contingent to a fixed price , also ahead of time . The offers are ranked based on price, which s imply ensures that sources with the lowest marginal cost will be tapped first and the one with the highest at last . This is known as the โ€œMerit Order Effectโ€ and allows to grid operator to reliably match most of the demand with minimum cost [SensfuรŸ, Ragwitz et al. 2008] .
But as exac t demand is uncertain, the operator must still be able to adjust power supply within short time (less than 30 seconds). To do so operating reserve is necessary, which are basically forms of power production that can be started or shut down almost immediate ly. As aforementioned, renewable energy sources do not allow for controlled production of power and the production can vary tremendously within minutes . This not only does make it difficult to know supply from RES ahead of time but also makes them unfittin g to function as operating reserve. Therefore, new methods and technology is required to perform successful balancing in a grid with high penetration of renew ables [Hirth and Ziegenhagen 2015] . Assuming a current market with a power mix, operating reserve is not an issue as it can be covered through traditional means. Therefore, this researc h focuses on making RE supply plannable and reliable in the scope of a power bidding market.Introduction 17 1.1.2. Battery Energy Storage Systems Battery Energy Storage Systems (BESS) emerge as a potential solution to not just to solve the mismatch of PV output and demand profi les, but also the intermittency and inherent unpredictability of RE . There a many different Energy Storage Systems (ESS) , of which an overview is presented in Figure 3. Opposed to other ESS, BESS and especially Li -ion batteries have a number of benefits including: High Energy Density โ€“ Modularity โ€“ Scalability โ€“ Failure -safety โ€“ Replaceability โ€“ High Roundtrip Efficiency [Diouf and Pode 2015] . Nevertheless, battery solution s are expensive and suffer from relatively short lifetime. Therefore, a method for optimal sizing is necessary to prevent over-dimensioning. Figure 3: Energy Storage Technologies [Das, Bass et al. 2018] Introduction 18 1.1.3. Multi system consideration Further it will be demonstrated how combining forecasts from multiple systems into a composition will results in overall reduced percentage error and why this approach is to be preferred over the more common single system analysis. The issue lies within that in the electricity grid a single system is not isolated but instead all systems are feeding into the same network. Therefore, the forecast of a system should also not be viewed in isolation but rather in conjunction with other systems. The effect of this that the relative error will decrease as the natural result of th e fact that whil e some forecast will overestimate others will underestimate the true power production . The reduction of this error will also lead for a smaller capacity of BESS, as opposed to planning the capacity based on individual forecasts. 1.1.4. Error Analysis When evaluat ing the quality or performance of a forecast this is often done through a unidimensional metric, like MSE, RMSE, MAPE. While this often helps to have a general assessment of the forecast, it does not convey the unique characteristics of each model. Varianc e between errors, forecast tendencies, weaknesses , strengths and many other characteristics of the forecast are not able to be assessed solely by those metrics. This information is of critical value though when employing any forecast in a practical scenari o. Only by understanding in under which circumstances a forecast performs well and when it does not, allows that the appropriate amount of trust can be given and the forecast becomes valuable for practical application . So, we should view forecasting more l ike it was expressed by Paul Saffo: โ€œThe goal of forecasting is not to predict the future but to tell you what you need to know to take meaningful action in the present.โ€, because no forecast is always 100% correct. For the capacity planning of Introduction 19 a BESS that is relevant as even only one large error that is an outlier from the rest could cause issues with the capacity of the BESS . Either it canโ€™t cover up for the error or the battery capacity must be large enough to cover, but making it generally oversized considering all other errors. Therefore, reliability of the errors is more important than average accuracy for this case.
The first reason that the model architectures are and have been extensively explored and summarized in other research [Lai, Chang et al. 2020] . The second reason is that according to โ€œNo free lunch theoremโ€ there is no single model which will perform best for every problem. The theorem states : โ€œthat all optimization algorithms perform equally well when their performance is averaged across all possible problems โ€. In short there is not one best forecast model for any domain. The authors also highlight the importance of applying problem -specific knowledge when creating an algorithm. Therefore, the expectation can never be th at one model will perform equally on two different sets of data of different origin [Wolpert and Macready 1997] . While this theory does not originate in machine learning it has been proven to be true for it as well [Kuhn and Johnson 2013] .Introduction 20 1.2. Existing Research To solve the issue intermittency and unpredictability various solu tion have been proposed. Besides BESS common discussed topics are super grids and smart grids. Since the stated goal is providing a solution that can be applied immediately under current circumstances, these two solutions are not alternate option as shown followingly [Anees 2012] . Further a short summary o f the existing battery related studies is given.
1.2.1. Super grid One solution the European Union is currently investing in a so called โ€œSuper gridโ€, which links European countries and surrounding countries through an additional high-voltage power grid that sits on top of the existing grids [Cole, Vrana et al. 2011] .The idea is that by covering a wider area the irregularity of sources like solar and wind can be reduced and therefore serve baseload, which it is currently unable to do. Simply put when covering a larger area a perce ntage of all wind capacity will become reliably utilizable [Archer and Jacobson 2007] . But isolated locations like islands do not have physical access to such a power grid nor most countries are in the political situation to realize such a s ystem, which requires transnational cooperation and stability, as such a system is prone to geo -political risk [Czisch and Schmid] . Beyond that there are also many tec hnical challenges present, such as different utility frequency between grids, which requires expensive conversion to interconnect them. Further expansion of power lines is necessary to cope for the geographical mismatch between production and consumption i s a super grid [Aghahosseini, Bogdanov et al. 2020] .Introduction 21 1.2.2. Smart Grids One commonly proposed system to make renewabl e energy a viable solution are smart grids. Instead of only providing the one -way process of delivering power from its generation source to the consumer, s mart grids can be described as the integration of power generation sources, storage systems and consu mers into a network, which allows bi -directional energy flow and exchange of information. This technology, that enables communication, and therefore automated control of the all its systems to achieve grid balance and stability, is what gives the grid its smart prefix . The supposed benefits are improved efficiency and reliability, also allowing for large -scale integration of renewable energy source and their unstable power production patterns. This achieved not only just by powering devices on and off depe nding on the available energy but also using sensor to accommodate for upcoming changes in power production. An example for this would be a wind turbine, which operations relies on numerous sensor which in turn can also feed various information to the grid about climate and environment [Hu and Lanzon 2019] . But to transform currently existing grids into smart grids, extensive amount of work is required . The transition is not only costly but also requires time for installation and tuning of the network. The Electric Power Research Institute estimated a cost of $338 billion to $476 billion to implement a fully functional smart grind in the USA [EPRI 2011] . Introduction 22 1.2.3.
Battery Storage Systems Due to drawbacks in regards of cost but also considering the aspect of time that is required to realize super and smart grids, do not deliver an immediate solution for solving intermittency issues of renewable energy. Electrical Storage Systems (ESS) instead can be integrated into existing grid and are already available. The application of ESS is widely researched . It can be summarized into a f ew categories, based on scope and goals. For the scope, there are three different applications: Off-Grid โ€“ Micro -Grid โ€“ Large Power -Grid ( e.g., national grid). The goals can be summed up as: Cost - Optimization โ€“ Intermittency Negation โ€“ Curtailment Reductio n. This research falls within the scope of a large power -grid with the goal of negating intermittency.
Therefore, the followingly describe d research, also mainly evolves around this topic as well. The effectiveness of a battery system in national grids ha s been demonstrated through the Hornsdale Power Reserve in Australia, a 150 MW battery built by Tesla. As presented by the โ€œAurecon Hornsdale Power Reserve Impact Studyโ€ since the introduction of the power reserve it allowed for savings of nearly AUD 40 mil lion in regulation costs [aurecon 2018] . Keck et. Al. present in reference to the Hornsdale Power Reserve a simulation -based approach on estimating the required ESS capacity for all of Australia [Keck, Lenzen et al. 2019] .
Al. consider battery sizing for the behind the meter application, with the goal of reducing electricity cost of commercial and industrial customers with high consumption in markets where electricity rates changes depending on time of use [Wu, Kintner -Meyer et al. 2017] .
Al. provides a comprehensive comparison of a pproaches for storage sizing in hybrid power systems, where solar, wind and a battery are coupled to satisfy demand Introduction 23 requirements. These approaches optimize cost while having a set constraint on demand mismatch [Hatata, Osman et al.
Arnold and Andersson present a research closest to the idea of this thesis, which is using BESS to counter forecast errors. They use a Monte -Carlo simulatio n to simulate errors and determine required battery capacity to counter these errors. The approach is optimized around a cost metric, meaning it allows to that large errors are not compensated if beneficial to overall cost model [Arnold and Andersson 2011] . In the presented studies the solution was optimized around a cost metric. But solely considering co st does might lead to suboptimal solution in regards to solving the issue of intermittency . In other words what might be beneficial from an economic perspective of different parties, does not have to be optimal for ensuring a stable supply of power . Furthe r the studies rely solely on simulated or probabilistic data for determining the battery size, which always carries the risk of not being transferable to real-world case. This research instead provides a new approach where the goal is the compensation of e rrors with minimal capacity for the BESS at any given point in time , based on real forecast data . While this approach might not lead to the most cost -optimal solution in short -term, it provides a solution that is feasible long -term. The assumption is that while it can be short -term optimal to allow not being able to fully compensate errors for some of the parties in the market, long -term full compensation must be ensured for grid stability and therefore market mechanisms, li ke fees for not being able to del iver power, will eventually make anything but full -compensation of errors suboptimal, also in terms of cost.Research design and methodology 2. Research design and methodology Before determining the battery capacity, all data required for the simulation first must be created. Therefore, after obtaining the solar power data, the first step is the creation of forecasts for all datasets are produced via an automated process. This is followed by post -processing, including adjustment of the error to a mean of zero. Afterwards all dataset is combi ned into a single composition covering all forecasts. An evaluation of the error characteristics of the composite forecasts is shown, as well as a demonstration of the improvement provided over using individual forecast in insolation. The acquired composit ion is subsequently is utilized through a simulation - based approach to establish the capacity necessary, to compensate for the forecast error . In other words, the capacity needed , so that the power retrieved from or stored to the battery in addition to the actual produced power is always equal to the forecasted power value at any given point in time . Besides this main condition, further requirements in regards maximum depth of discharge (DoD) and Cycle Life can be defined and battery capacity adjusted based on those requirements. For validation purposes all variables are established and tested on two different sets of data.Research design and methodology 2.1.
Data Origin The data used within this research all stems from a single provider. In total 3 6 datasets were considered (one dataset per i nverter) , stemming from three different locations. All datasets range from the 13th of December 2019 to the 30th of June 2020, a total of 2 01 days with one datapoint every ten minutes . The dataset s in their original form all include the same six columns โ€“ Datetime , Irradiance , Inverter Temperature and Power Output . Pre-processing of the data was minimal, since there were no missing values , a minimal number of outliers were present, and only few implausible irradiance values during the night time were replac ed with 0 (since there canโ€™t be solar power generation when there is no sunshine) . To further enhance the data, feature engineering is employed, which allows to add additional features to data, which can improve model performance [Cassano 2018] : 1. Deriving the current time of the day in minutes 2. Deriving if an observation occurred at night or during sunshine hours as True or False, which were obtained from https://sunrise.maplogs.com/ . This helps the model to better learn when irradiance and therefore power production starts. It is also valuable in post -processing, as any faulty predictions can be corrected, by setting any prediction value to zero if it does occur at a time known to be before sunrise or after sunset. 3. Various statistical distribution of inverter temperature, irradiance and power . In detail, the mean, median, maximum value and standard deviation over the last hour is computed.
Research design and methodology 2.2. Forecast Modelling As mentioned earlier the intention of this paper is not to explore and explain forecasting models and their performance. Therefore, also few explanations or justification for the choices made during the modelling process is given , as it would divert from the focus of the research. Not only are the re already many papers existing on this topic , but also, any model is fitted specific to one da taset or in other words, one system [Lai, Chang et al. 2020] . Transferability of a model with same results from one system to another is usually not the case . This is d ue to the many different variables that influence any forecast model, which tend to strongly differ between systems. Nevertheless, the approach of obtaining the forecast results will be explained as it is essential for correctly positioning the results an d for the purpose of reproducibility . Figure 4 below gives an overview of the model training process. Figure 4: Forecast modelling process Research design and methodology 27 The forecasts target is to predict the power pr oduced for 10 minutes ahead, which is equal to one step ahead for the used datasets. The LSTM model used is a simple one -layer model, it consists of one LSTM layer with number of nodes equal to the current combination in the grid search (refer to Table 1), this is followed by one Dense layer with the same number of nodes as the LSTM layer and a final Dense layer of size one.
The layer has no additional configuration, all settings are d efault. The reason for this choice, is previous research on the data that adding layers, regulations or dropout does not significantly improve performance or even does worsen it. Again, the chosen architecture and configuration might not be the most optimi zed but model accuracy is not a target of this research, the simplicity helps reducing the time for training the models, as there are 36 individual datasets for which a model must be trained. Also d ue to the large number of datasets to be processed handcra fting and tuning a model for each of those would be too time -consuming, instead a fixed automated pipe is developed utilizing a grid search to generate various models with varying parameters for each dataset . The input to the training is the datasets after being processed as described in the previous chapter. The 201 days of data are split into 139 days for training and another 62 days for testing. The training is fed to a grid search , where a model for each possible combination for a set of parameters is traine d. The set of parameters are displayed in Table 1. For each combination five LSTM models are trained. This repetition is necessary, weight initialization of the model training part is stochastic, which causes e ach new repetition to create models with different final weights, which in turn affects a modelโ€™s performance. Finally, the best model/configuration for each dataset is chosen based on the lowest average mean absolute error for this configuration. Research design and methodology 28 Table 1: Grid search parameters Parameter Values Nodes 16, 32, 64, 128 Epochs 25, 50, 75 Lookback Period 3, 6, 9 This approach should lead to better results than using just one fixed configuration for each dataset, while still allows the whole process to be automated, shorting development time, as compared to manual hyperparameter optimization. Additionally, as will be shown later on, high accuracy for all datasets in the composition is not important for the research conducted but shou ld be reasonable to ensure real - world applicability of the results.
After the modelling process, post -processing is applied the forecast in results in following ways: 1. All forecasts that predict power generation during known night are set to zero. 2. The pow er value of the original dataset has the property of only occurring in a fixed interval size of 0.06. Since the original value is non -continuous, while our forecast is continuous, the error might be unfairly high. Instead, the forecasted is rounded to next closest multiple of 0.06. 3. The true singed error of each forecast is adjusted to have a mean of zero. The exact approach is explained in the following chapter, due to the importance of this step to the effect of the forecast composition.Research design and methodology 2.3. Forecast Composit ion The majority of papers related to renewable energy forecasts does focus only a single or few systems /datasets but most often on each of them independently . Basically, a set of model s is evaluated through multiple datasets. While this make sense for off - grid cases, the problem with this common approach is that systems (in case of solar usually on an inverter basis) are being viewed in isolation although in reality those systems are not isolated at all. A solar farm consists of many panels and inverters , all with the same operator and all feeding into the same grid. Same does hold true for wind power, where there is usually more than wind turbine owned by an operator. A composite view can utilize the effect that while forecast for some systems will produce errors of overestimation, others will produce errors of underestimati on. Therefore, when combining those forecast these oppositely singed errors will naturally equal each other out to some extent. The approach is similar to that of a forecast ensemble, wh ere multiple forecasts are created for one dataset and the average of these forecasts is used to make a prediction. In this case, one forecast per dataset/system is present. Instead of taking the average of the predictions for each timestep , the prediction s are simply just summed up and the same is done for actual values, as the total amount of power produced and fed into grid is relevant, but necessarily how much each individual system produces. Therefore, also the relevant error is the difference between the actuals and forecasts of all systems. ๐ด๐‘ก๐‘๐‘œ๐‘š=โˆ‘ ๐ด๐‘ก๐‘–๐‘š ๐‘–=1 ; ๐น๐‘ก๐‘๐‘œ๐‘š=โˆ‘ ๐น๐‘ก๐‘–๐‘š ๐‘–=1 (1) ๐ธ๐‘Ÿ๐‘Ÿ๐‘œ๐‘Ÿ ๐‘ก๐‘๐‘œ๐‘š= ๐ด๐‘ก๐‘๐‘œ๐‘šโˆ’๐น๐‘ก๐‘๐‘œ๐‘š (2) Research design and methodology 30 With the assumption that some of the forecasts have positive error , while others have negative errors t his should decrease all common relative error metrics, but especially the MAPE metric is influenced by that. Also, the MAPE error of multiple combined forecasts can never be greater than the maximum error of its individ ual components, as better performing forecasts will compensate for worse performing once. The mathematical notation are as follows ๐‘€๐ด๐‘ƒ๐ธ = 1 ๐‘›โˆ‘|๐ด๐‘กโˆ’๐น๐‘ก ๐ด๐‘ก|๐‘› ๐‘ก=1 (3) ๐‘€๐ด๐‘ƒ๐ธ ๐‘๐‘œ๐‘š = 1 ๐‘›โˆ‘|โˆ‘ ๐ด๐‘ก๐‘–๐‘š ๐‘–=1 โˆ’ โˆ‘ ๐น๐‘ก๐‘–๐‘š ๐‘–=1 โˆ‘ ๐ด๐‘ก๐‘–๐‘š ๐‘–=1|๐‘› ๐‘ก=1 (4) ๐‘€๐ด๐‘ƒ๐ธ ๐‘๐‘œ๐‘š โ‰คmax ({๐‘€๐ด๐‘ƒ๐ธ 1,โ€ฆ,๐‘€๐ด๐‘ƒ๐ธ ๐‘–}) (5) Where ๐ด๐‘ก is the actual value and ๐น๐‘ก is the forecasted value of period ๐‘ก, ๐‘› is the number of total observations, and ๐‘š is total number of forecasts . The Hypothesis therefore is that with inc reasing number of forecasts combined, the overall combined MAPE also continues to decrease. To validate this hypothesis, sets of combinations of forecasts are created and the respective percentage error of each of the combinations is calculated. Each set includes only combinations of a certain size, the first set would be all the individual forecasts, the second set would be combinations of two forecasts and so on, until the last set, which represents all forecasts combined. The number of sets is therefore equal to the number of individual forecasts. Successively the error of each combination is calculated and the range of errors within each set is obtained. The progression of average, maximum and minimum error throughout these sets will be visualized and should deliver a robust basis to judge effectiveness of forecast composition. Particular Research design and methodology 31 attention is to be brought on whether the changes in error with each additional increment of set size is linearly or exponentially increasing or decreasing. Optimally ea ch set includes all possible combinations, but the number of possible combinations the largest set will have increases exponentially with the number of individual forecasts (n), as depending on set size (r) their number is equal to ๐‘›! ๐‘Ÿ!(๐‘›โˆ’๐‘Ÿ)! (6) This might be feasible when only a small pool of forecasts is present. In this case 36 individual forecasts are used for validation, the largest set where 18 forecasts are to be combined would thereby have 9,075,135,300 possible combinations. Creating all combinations therefore is not feasibly in terms of computational time . Instead, forecasts are randomly chosen to be combined, so that per set the number of combinations is equal to number of individual forecasts ( , meaning each s et has 36 combinations), with the exception being the last set which includes the combination of all forecasts, where there is only one possib le combination, therefore it includes only a single combination. Additionally, t o utilize this effect to its fulle st the condition must be that forecast are balanced in regards to over - and underestimation, meaning neither the forecast have predominantly positive or negative errors. The mean of all real integer errors must be zero or at least close to zero . In the cas e the present data does not inherently have this property, it must be adjusted towards a zero -mean error . One method to undertake this adjustment is presented followingly. Using the forecast o f each training data, the singed integer error is calculated. Afterwards the average of this error per hour of the day is computed . This information is then translated to the forecast on the unseen test data, by adjusting a forecast value by the mean error of is respective time group established on Research design and methodology 32 the training data. As a result, the average error is closer zero than it was before the adjustment , as it is now tendency of over - and underestimation is accounted for. This method is simple and is not able to account for seasonality or changes in the mean error over time. B ut due to the short time period of the data these factors cannot be accounted for.
Nevertheless, an improvement should be present. Lastly it should be addressed why the data is not combine first and only a singular forecast is created. T he reason why there is not only singular forecast for all these systems together is that each system has their own unique characteristics that influence their power production (efficiency coefficients, installation angles etc.). Producing only one forecast would not be able to cover all these. Therefore, influential unique information is lost and likely a worse performance would be achieved [Korotcov, Tkachenko et al. 2017] .
2.4. Derivin g Storage Cap acity The goal is to calculate the minimal required battery size that can compensate all forecasting error of the composition at any given point in time ๐‘ก. Besides an initial charge the battery can only be charged by the system s considered in the composition.
Multiple factors impact the required battery capacity, which will be laid out followingly. From these factors a set of conditions is derived. These conditions are applied to a simulation of the battery charge over time from which the battery capacity is derived as a result.Research design and methodology 2.4.1. Relevant Factors The following discussed factors are viewed in relation to Li -Ion batteries . While partly also applying to other batteries like Redox -Flow battery, not all of them do and might not in the same way. Due to the c haracteristics of Li-Ion batteries explained in Chapter 1 and under the goal of provid ing a solution that is applicable now, a solitary view on just Li -ion batteries is justified and reasonable from the authorโ€™s point of view. 2.4.1.1. Depth of Discharge The Depth of Discharge (D oD) or more precisely the maximum DoD determines how much power can ex tracted from or charge to a battery within a given time . Exceeding this limit can cause significant permanent damage to the battery and therefore reduce its lifetime or even cause outright failure. The effect of DoD on the cycle life of the battery is show n below in Figure 5. Therefore, the battery capacity must consider the resulting DoD to prevent short -lived battery systems [Qadrdan, Jenkins et al. 2018] . Figure 5: DoD impact on cycle life [Qadrdan, Jenkins et al. 2018] Research design and methodology 2.4.1.2. Conversion Losses Whenever a battery is charged or discharged some of the energy is lo st as hea t, a conversion loss occurs, usually termed efficiency in the context of BESS. While the charging and discharging efficiency might differ, often a single parameter, the roundtrip efficiency, is provided by the manufacturer. For the simulation that means that whenever power is charged or discharged these efficiencies must be conside red [Toman, Cipin et al. 2016] .
2.4.1.3. Permanent Capacity Loss Permanent ca pacity loss, refers due losses in capacity that are not recoverable through charging. The permanent capacity loss is mainly affected by the number of full charge and discharge cycles, battery load/voltage and temperature. This capacity loss is unavoidable but can be reduced through proper battery management. For once partial charges and discharges instead of full ones, improve the lifetime of the battery. Further avoiding times where the battery is in fully charged condition also benefits lifetime. This is due to chemical reaction that occur within a Li -ion battery which are fastened by high voltage and temperatures [Broussely, Biensan et al.
While these factors and their influence actual capacity loss are not be evaluated in numerical terms , they are still be considered within the model. Ensuring partial charging and discharging, is inherently covered as the power will only be charged or discharged to equal out forecast error. Therefore, unless a continuous series of positiv e or negative errors occurs, no full charging or discharging will occur. To prevent the battery from being fully charged a buffer will be defined. This means if the current charge of the BESS in the model exceeds a certain limit, the following forecast wil l be adjusted upwards, such that a discharge will occur, reducing the batteryโ€™s charge level. Research design and methodology 35 2.4.1.4. Self-Discharge Batteries self -discharge over time regardless of if they are connected to a grid or not. The rate of which a battery discharges differs depending o n model, state -of- charge ( SoC), temperature and age. For current Li -ion batteries the rate of self - discharge is estimated to be around 1.5 -3% per month. While this effect is neglectable in the very short term, it can accumulate to large amount over time an d must be factored in when determining storage size. [Zimmerman 2004] . As this research presents theoretical work, a fixed s elf-discharge rate (๐œ๐‘ ๐‘‘) is assumed, as the influencing factors, like temperature cannot be accurately modeled. 2.4.2.
Constraints Based on the set goal and relevant factors explained before, a set of constraints can be derived. Some of these constraints are necessary to be ful filled while other are only optional, which will be outlined clearly in their respective description. The final required capacity of the BESS is equal to the smallest value satisfying all constraints. The major constraint which represents the essence of ou r goal, is represented through Equation (7), that at any given point in time ๐‘ก the actual amount of produced power in addition with either charging and discharging power must be equal to forecasted amount of power. ๐น๐‘ก=๐ด๐‘กโˆ’๐‘ƒ๐‘๐‘ก+๐‘ƒ๐‘‘๐‘ก (7) This true when the energy stored in BESS ( ๐ธ๐‘ก) never drops below zero and also never exceeds its capacity, while ๐ธ๐‘ก is equal to the energy stored at the previous timestep factoring in self -discharge plus either the energy that has been charged to it or minus the energy that has been discharged to it. Research design and methodology 36 ๐ต๐ธ๐‘†๐‘† ๐‘๐‘Ž๐‘โ‰ฅ๐ธ๐‘กโ‰ฅ0 (8) ๐ธ๐‘ก=๐ธ๐‘กโˆ’1โˆ—(1โˆ’๐œ๐‘ ๐‘‘)+(ฮท๐‘ โˆ—๐‘ƒ๐‘๐‘กโˆ’๐‘ƒ๐‘‘๐‘ก ฮท๐‘‘) (9) Since the battery in this model is solely either charged or discharged, at any given point in time either ๐‘ƒ๐‘๐‘ก or ๐‘ƒ๐‘‘๐‘ก is zero while the other is difference between forecasted power and actual power. (๐ด๐‘ก>๐น๐‘ก) โ†’๐‘ƒ๐‘๐‘ก=๐ด๐‘ก โˆ’๐น๐‘ก ; ๐‘ƒ๐‘‘๐‘ก=0 (๐ด๐‘ก<๐น๐‘ก) โ†’๐‘ƒ๐‘‘๐‘ก=๐น๐‘ก โˆ’๐ด๐‘ก ; ๐‘ƒ๐‘๐‘ก=0 (10) Further the maximum depth of discharge must be considered . The amount of power that can be charged to or discharged from the battery in one timestep , cannot exceed the maximum depth of discharge in W which depends on the capacity of the battery. โˆ† (๐ธ๐‘กโˆ’๐ธ๐‘กโˆ’1) โ‰ค ๐›ฟ๐‘‘๐‘œ๐‘‘โˆ—๐ต๐ธ๐‘†๐‘† ๐‘๐‘Ž๐‘ (11) In connection to the preceding equation, the buffer size ( ฮฒ) of the battery must be considered. The buffer size in percent can be freely determined, but must at least cover the maximum value of ๐‘ƒ๐‘๐‘ก and ๐‘ƒ๐‘‘๐‘ก. The buffer function as a soft buffer, meaning it can be temporary crossed. Here the reliability of the model is extremely important and fundamental knowledge of the occurrence of large errors.
If Equation (7) must be fulfilled without any exception than it must consider the highest possible error, even if it is a single outlier. โˆ†(๐ต๐ธ๐‘†๐‘† ๐‘๐‘Ž๐‘โˆ’ ๐ฟ๐‘–๐‘š ๐‘ข๐‘)>๐‘š๐‘Ž๐‘ฅ (๐‘ƒ๐‘) (12) โˆ†(0 โˆ’ ๐ฟ๐‘–๐‘š ๐‘™๐‘œ๐‘ค)>๐‘š๐‘Ž๐‘ฅ (๐‘ƒ๐‘‘) (13) Research design and methodology 37 Lastly as an optional constraint the desired cycle life ( ๐ถ๐ฟ) of the battery can be considered. As described previously a batter yโ€™s life time is usually determined by a number a fixed n umber of cycles and the remaining capacity afterwards . A desired cycle life ( ๐ถ๐ฟ) can be defined as a number of cycles over a period of time. The accumulated amount of charged and discharged power for a given time period divided by the desired cycle life for the same time period, is equal to the required battery capacity to reach desired cycle life. While partial charges and discharges are not causing capacity loss to the same degree as full ones, it is common to consider them as such [de Vries, Nguyen et al. 2015] .
๐ต๐ธ๐‘†๐‘† ๐‘๐‘Ž๐‘ = โˆ‘๐‘ƒ๐‘๐‘ก๐‘ก + โˆ‘๐‘ƒ๐‘‘๐‘ก๐‘ก ๐ถ๐ฟ(๐‘ก) (14) 2.4.3. Simu lation Method To determine the required capacity for a set of systems in a composition a simulation -based approach will be employed. This method is inspired by dam capacity planning, where demand (the required water flow out) and the water flow into a reservoir over time is simulated to decide on its capacity [Jain 2017] . The process of the simulation consists of the following steps: 1. Split data into two sets, one for establis hing capacity the other one for validation . Meaning the following steps will only consider the first set for establishing the initial capacity. All conditions are then tested through the simulation for both sets . 2. Define an initial capacity. This is achieve d by making use of the DoD condition expressed in Equation (11). This limits the maximum Resear ch design and methodology 38 charge/discharge in relation to the battery capacity that can occur for one timestep. The maximum charge/discharge (ignoring efficiencies) is equal to the highest absolute error made by the forecast. The initial capacity for the BESS therefore can be defined as: ๐ต๐ธ๐‘†๐‘† ๐‘๐‘Ž๐‘๐‘–๐‘›๐‘–๐‘ก= โŒˆmax (๐‘ƒ๐‘,๐‘ƒ๐‘‘) ๐›ฟ๐‘‘๐‘œ๐‘‘โŒ‰ (15) 3. Determine the initial battery charg e (๐ธ0). This serves the purpose of not going below zero charge level of the BESS , in case early in the simulation discharges are necessary. ๐ธ0 is set to half of ๐ต๐ธ๐‘†๐‘† ๐‘๐‘Ž๐‘๐‘–๐‘›๐‘–๐‘ก, basically saying the battery initial charge level is half o f its capacity. 4.
Determine the values for ๐ฟ๐‘–๐‘š ๐‘ข๐‘ and ๐ฟ๐‘–๐‘š ๐‘™๐‘œ๐‘ค. This simply depend on the buffer size (๐›ฝ), which can be freely determined. ๐ฟ๐‘–๐‘š ๐‘ข๐‘๐‘๐‘’๐‘Ÿ = ๐ต๐ธ๐‘†๐‘† ๐‘๐‘Ž๐‘ โˆ—(1 โˆ’ฮฒ) ๐ฟ๐‘–๐‘š ๐‘™๐‘œ๐‘ค๐‘’๐‘Ÿ = ๐ต๐ธ๐‘†๐‘† ๐‘๐‘Ž๐‘ โˆ—๐›ฝ (16) 5. Define a battery management policy. To keep the size at a minimum , an active component can be added to the method . Whenever ๐ธ๐‘ก does exceed ๐ฟ๐‘–๐‘š ๐‘ข๐‘ or falls below ๐ฟ๐‘–๐‘š ๐‘™๐‘œ๐‘ค the next forecast can be simply adjusted by a small amount to bring the battery charge back within the boundaries. For example, if the upper boundary is exceeded and the forecast value is purposefully increased, then as a result it is likely that power needs to be discharged, as almost certainly the forecast is now higher than the actual amount of power produced. This in turn lowers the charge of the battery. Besides keeping this value relatively small there is no obvious guidelines to Research design and methodology 39 decide on the exact value . To keep the correction in line with oth er charging and discharging values, it is set to the half of the absolute error of the forecast. That ensures it is not too distinctive from other errors, preventing potential problems that are currently unforeseen but still large enough to bring the batte ry load back within boundaries . ๐›ผ= 1 2max (๐‘ƒ๐‘,๐‘ƒ๐‘‘) (17) (๐ธ๐‘ก> ๐ฟ๐‘–๐‘š ๐‘ข๐‘๐‘๐‘’๐‘Ÿ ) โ†’๐น๐‘ก+1๐‘›๐‘’๐‘ค=๐น๐‘ก+1+ฮฑ (๐ธ๐‘ก< ๐ฟ๐‘–๐‘š ๐‘™๐‘œ๐‘ค๐‘’๐‘Ÿ ) โ†’๐น๐‘ก+1๐‘›๐‘’๐‘ค=๐น๐‘ก+1โˆ’ฮฑ (18) Analysis 3.
Zero -Mean Adjustment Followingly the effect of the zero -mean adjustment is visualized and explained. Below in Figure 6 a series of boxplot showing the true error based on hour of the day of the forecast composition with original unadjusted data is displayed . Generally, the boxplot displays the distribution of errors, the box itself , called interquartile range (IQR), represents the range from the 25% -quartile (Q1) to the 75% -quartile (Q3) and the black continuous lines, called whiskers, repr esent the range from ๐‘„1โˆ’1.5โˆ—๐ผ๐‘„๐‘… to ๐‘„3+1.5โˆ—๐ผ๐‘„๐‘…, all dots are considered outliers and represent single datapoints, while the IQR and whiskers do not convey information about the number of datapoints within them . Most important for the present case of battery determination is the median and mean. The median (Q2) is marked by the black bar within the box, while the mean is represented is marked by the red cross. In this unadjusted case all the mean values for all the hours of the day are below zero. Thi s implies the model has tendency to underpredict. Note that this excludes the hour 0 to 4 and hour 19 to 23 where all points lie directly on zero. As the used data is solar data, the production and forecasts will be zero during those times, consequently al so resulting in an error of zero, which causes these hours to appear as flat lines within the boxplot. All following boxplot will have this characteristic inherent.
The issue resulting from that is that is easier to understand when looking at Figure 7. Consistent underprediction also would mean the battery needs to be consistently charged and would only be rarely discharged, which is not a practical scenario. Analysis 41 Figure 6: Error based on dayti me Figure 7: Cumulative Error over Time Analysis 42 Since a balanced number of charges and discharges is preferred, the zero mean - adjustment is employed. The impact of this adjustment on the error distribution of the forecast composition can be seen in Figure 8. The mean of the error for hour 5 to 9 and hour 14 to 18 is a lot closer to zero than it was before the adjustment. For hour 10 to 13 the mean is now slightly above zero. Presumably that is due t he mean error of the test - data during these hours not being as high as for the train -data. Figure 8: Adjusted error based on daytime Analysis 43 That case implies trend or seasonality of the error, in other words the error distribution ch anges over time, which causes the chosen approach to not be perfectly able to balance the error. But to factor in seasonality properly multi -year data would be necessary which is not present. Regardless, as shown in Figure 9, the error of the adjusted data is more balanced than before. The cumulative error of the unadjusted data was at roughly -10,000 at the end of the two-month period, after the adjustment after the same period it is at about -250. Optimally it woul d be hovering close to zero consistently. Figure 9: Cumulative Error over Time (Adjusted data) Analysis 3.2. Forecast Compositio n To validate the established hypothesis of reducing errors by combining multiple forecasts, a total of 36 indivi dual dataset and respective forecasts are used. Figure 10 shows the progression of errors with increas ing set size.
Each step along the x -axis represents an increase of the set size , while the y -axis represents the magnitude of error . The first datapoint therefore is distribution of the individual datasets. For example, t he second datapoint describes the error distribution of all sets consisting of two combined datasets, increasing further with each step. The last da tapoint is the combination of all datasets, and therefore only a single value , as there is only one possible combination . Figure 10: Forecast Composition โ€“ Percentage Error Progression Analysis 45 Out of the initial 36 forecasts, the minimu m MAPE is 3.066%, while the maximum MAPE is 10. 693% and the overall average is 5.0 19%. As seen in Figure 10 all three metrics tend to generally decrease with increasing number of combined forecasts. While the median and minimum decrease s relatively smoothly, the maximum fluctuates until it is experiencing a more gradual curtailment from 1 8 combined forecasts onwards. Also, it is to be observed that magnitude of decreases for median and minimum error is largest in the beginning, but is quickly converging at around a set size of 10 -15 combined forecasts. In fact, the exact numbers presented in Appendix 1., reveal that after 1 2 combined forecasts the mean stop continuously decreasing but still reaching its overall minimu m of 1.9 61% at 36 combined forecasts. The overall smallest minimum error of 1. 708% is found at 1 2 combined forecasts, while afterwards the minimum error ranges from 1.7 44% to 1.9 61%, actually reaching its highest values after the minimum at the point where all datasets are combined. For the last set where all forecasts are combined , the MAPE for all metrics is 1.9 61%. Another useful property of the composition is revealed when, looking at the progression of the maximum percentage error (all numbers in Appen dix 2.) displayed in Figure 11. The figure is similar to previous but this time displaying the maximum error of each forecast along the y -axis. Note that the scale is logarithmic, so the reduction in maximum errors is more significant than they first appear by proportion. While within the individual datasets, percentage errors as high as 12,482% appeared, when combining the forecasts these errors are compensated for through the other individuals. The range of maximum errors seems to continuously decrease, which would suggest that with increasing number of set -size this compensation effect becomes more reliable to take place . The maximum error is important to battery capacity planning due to the condition of maximum Do D. High errors would either Analysis 46 mean large battery capacity to not violate the DoD condition or only covering a certain degree of error, meaning not all errors would be compensated, which would in turn not ease the operation of the grid, as the goal of negatin g the uncertainty is not fulfilled. In connection to this, the distribution of errors is also of significance to the battery capacity planning as high errors mean higher charges or discharges to the battery affecting the batteryโ€™s lifetime. As can be see n in Figure 12, the share of errors above 5% decreases with increasing set size (all numbers in Appendix 3.). While of the individual forecasts the highest one of them had 17% of its errors above 5%, but even the lo west one has share of 11.3%. Figure 11: Forecast Composition โ€“ Maximum Percentage Error Progression Analysis 47 Figure 12: Forecast Composition - PE Distribution Progression For the composition with all forecasts combined it was just 6.74% of the errors. As the share of errors above 5% is so distinctively higher for the first few composition sizes, below in Figure 13, the change from set -size 11 and onwards is displayed. Thi s clearly shows that the median share of high errors keeps decreasing almost continuously with increasing composition size. Analysis 48 Figure 13: Forecast Composition - PE Distribution Progression (11 onwards)Analysis 3.3. Battery Capacity Simulation Using the composite forecast, the simulation process described in the Chapter Simu lation Method is followingly applied to the dataset to determine the required battery size to counteract all inherent errors. Beyond t he forecast data it is also necessary to define the values of roundtrip efficiency and maximum DoD of the battery. These values vary depending between different manufactures and models. Therefore, it is necessary to test presented approach on multiple mode ls with different specifications. Further this might provide insight to how different battery properties affect the final capacity and also the reliable functioning of the battery. Maybe certain specification thresholds are required to ensure reliability. Two models with available specifications are the โ€œTesla Powerwall 2 โ€1 and the โ€œsonnen eco โ€2, with a roundtrip efficiency of 90% and 81.6%, as well as a maximum DoD of 100% and 90%, respectively. Since the manufactures only specify the roundtrip efficiency (ฮท๐‘Ÿ) it will be assumed that the charging and discharging efficiency are equal. ฮท๐‘= ฮท๐‘‘= โˆšฮท๐‘Ÿ (19) The simulation will be run with the values of these two batteries. This should also help to create a better underst anding of the effect these parameters have on the final capacity of the battery. For the self -discharge factor ๐œ๐‘†๐ท and the buffer -size ๐›ฝ, a value of 2 % per month and 25% is assumed, respectively, which both can be considered as common dimension for these variables [Swierczynski, Stroe et al. 2014] .
A ๐œ๐‘†๐ท of 2% per month is equal to about 0.000463 % per ten minutes. The numerical inputs and results of the simulation are displayed in 1https://www.tesla.com/sites/default/files/pdfs /powerwall/Powerwall%202_AC_Datasheet_en_northam erica.pdf 2https://sonnenusa.com/en/eco/#specifications Analysis 50 Analysis 51 Table 2, the third column showing the values of the Tesla Powerwall 2 and th e last column the values of the sonnen eco . To put results into the proper perspective, note that the total power production of the systems considered lies at 2,340,049 W (~2.34 MW) for a time period from the 30th April to the 30th June or a total of 62 da ys. To separate the procedure more clearly, the different parameters are grouped into stages. Stage 0 are the inherent properties of the battery models โ€“ Stage 1 are the parameters initially determined โ€“ Stage 2 are the numerical results of the simulation โ€“ Stage 3 shows the required capacity to reach different desired cycle life goals. The lesser ๐›ฟ๐‘‘๐‘œ๐‘‘ and lower efficiency of the sonnen eco results in a higher initial capacity of the battery. As a side effect that actually causes the boundaries to b e exceeded less often, the upper boundary is exceeded 70 times by the Tesla Powerwall 2, while only 66 times for the sonnen eco. The lower boundary is exceeded 79 times by the Tesla Powerwall 2, while only 75 times for the sonnen eco. This difference could be considered neglectable though. For both batteries models the simulation of the load never exceeds the capacity and also never falls below zero, which is the main condition. The ๐›ฟ๐‘‘๐‘œ๐‘‘ is exceeded only once by 5,9% . As the capacity of the sonnen eco is larger, the load of the battery is also higher on average, resulting in a higher total amount of self-discharge, while โˆ‘๐œ๐‘†๐ท in the two -month period for the Tesla Powerw all 2 is 7.45 W, it is 8.42 W for the sonnen eco, around 13% more. Regardless the se lf-discharge in both cases is neglectable small compared to the overall production. The difference in conversion losses is more significant, the sum of conversion losses of the sonnen eco are 9.66% higher than those of the Tesla Powerwall 2, an absolute difference of 2,007 W. The three desired cycle life are the defined based on the specification sheet of the battery models, the sonnen eco has a warranty for 10,000 cycles (estimated usage Analysis 52 is 10 years ), retaining 80% of the original capacity afterwards. The Tesla Powerwall 2 does not have a rated number of cycles but also specifies a 10-year warranty. In addition to the specification provided for the sonnen eco, two more conse rvative values will be tested, 6,000 and 8,000 cycles over 10 years . In all three cases the required capacity to comply with the defined desired cycle life, is lower than the already determined initial capacity. Since the cycle life condition is only optional, instead computing the cycles with initial capacity might be more interesting. For the Tesla Powerwall 2 the sum of charges and discharges are equal to 37,452.48 W, which is 96.28 times the capacity, propagated for one year this would correspond to 577.68 cycles. In the case of the sonnen eco the sum of charges and discharges propagated for one year would correspond to 516.3 cycles. The visualization of the simulated battery load for the Tesla Powerwall 2 and sonnen eco, is given in Figure 14 and Figure 15, respectively. The overall pattern is very similar as it is mainly determined by the error made by the forecast, which is the same in both cases.
Due to the employed loa d adjustment policy, both stay well within the limit of the total capacity and above zero. Analysis 53 Table 2: Capacity Simulation Stag e Parameters Tesla Powerwall 2 sonnen eco 0 ๐›ฟ๐‘‘๐‘œ๐‘‘ (For 10min) 16.6667% 15% ฮท๐‘= ฮท๐‘‘ 94.868% 90.0333% 1 ๐ต๐ธ๐‘†๐‘† ๐‘๐‘Ž๐‘๐‘–๐‘›๐‘–๐‘ก 389 W 433 W ๐ฟ๐‘–๐‘š ๐‘ข๐‘๐‘๐‘’๐‘Ÿ 291.75 W 324.75 W ๐ฟ๐‘–๐‘š ๐‘™๐‘œ๐‘ค๐‘’๐‘Ÿ 97.25 W 108.25 W ๐›ฟ๐‘‘๐‘œ๐‘‘ (๐‘–๐‘› ๐‘˜๐‘Š) 64.83 W ๐›ผ 32.4478 W 2 # (๐ธ๐‘ก> ๐ฟ๐‘–๐‘š ๐‘ข๐‘๐‘๐‘’๐‘Ÿ ) 70 66 # (๐ธ๐‘ก< ๐ฟ๐‘–๐‘š ๐‘™๐‘œ๐‘ค๐‘’๐‘Ÿ ) 79 75 max (๐ธ๐‘ก) 329.3567 W 362.14 W min (๐ธ๐‘ก) 58.8617 W 77.692 4 W max (๐‘ƒ๐‘) 50.37 W max (๐‘ƒ๐‘‘) 68.66 W โˆ‘๐œ๐‘†๐ท 7.4458 W 8.4197 W โˆ‘๐‘๐‘œ๐‘›๐‘ฃ๐‘’๐‘Ÿ๐‘ ๐‘–๐‘œ๐‘› ๐‘™๐‘œ๐‘ ๐‘ ๐‘’๐‘  20,770.87 W 22,777.67 W 3 โˆ‘๐‘ƒ๐‘๐‘ก ๐‘ก+ โˆ‘๐‘ƒ๐‘‘๐‘ก ๐‘ก 37,452.48 W 37,260.76 W ๐ต๐ธ๐‘†๐‘† ๐‘๐‘Ž๐‘(๐ถ๐ฟ= 6,000 10๐‘ฆ๐‘Ÿ) 375 W 372 W ๐ต๐ธ๐‘†๐‘† ๐‘๐‘Ž๐‘(๐ถ๐ฟ= 8,000 10๐‘ฆ๐‘Ÿ) 281 W 280 W ๐ต๐ธ๐‘†๐‘† ๐‘๐‘Ž๐‘(๐ถ๐ฟ= 10,000 10๐‘ฆ๐‘Ÿ) 225 W 224 W Analysis Figure 14: Simulated Battery Load (Tesla Powerwall 2) Analysis 55 Figure 15: Simulated Battery Load (sonnen eco) Results 4. Results 4.1.
Zero-Mean Adjustment As shown the zero-mean adjustment is a simple but effective method for correcting forecasts with an inherent tendency to either under - or overpredict. In Table 3 a comparison of the error distrib ution between the composition of the non -adjusted data and adjusted data is given. The overall mean is significantly closer to zero after adjusting. But the previously presented cumulative error throughout time ( Figure 9) also showed that the simplicity of the approach comes with caveats as well. While might being able to achieve a long -term balance of negative and positive errors, it fails to ensure that the error is balanced short -term. Temporal characteristics wer e present, meaning the overall tendency of underprediction is not consistent throughout time. Table 3: Comparison of Error Distribution Metric Non-adjusted data Adjusted data Minimum -72.261 -68.661 1st Quartile -1.945 -0.271 Median 0 0 Mean -1.153 -0.028 3rd Quartile 0 1.242 Maximum 46.834 50.374 Results 4.2. Forecast Composition The effective overall mean percentage error for the 36 forecasts has been reduced by roughly 60% simply by adjusting their true error to be centered around zer o and consecutively combining them. Another benefit is that extreme errors in individual forecast are cancelled out. While the overall highest single percentage error out of all the individual forecast lies at 12,482%, the highest single error of the combi nation that includes all forecasts lies only at 110% , a reduction by about 113.47 times . When looking at the share of percentage errors that was higher than 5% (subjectively considered as significant error), the worst individual had a share of 17%, while t he final composition had a share of just 6,74%. Besides this quantitative evaluation of the improvement, the effects can also be seen when visualizing the forecast, which allows for a less abstract insight to the results. In Figure 16 and Figure 17 we can see the power forecasts for the 16th of May, the prior figure is the forecast of a single system while the latter is the forecast for the composition. Note how the single sys tem forecasts struggles with correctly predicting sudden changes when power generated is fluctuating, as it occurs from 13:00 to 15:00. The gap between the blue line (actually produced power) and green line (predicted power) is clearly visible. When lookin g at the forecast for the composition the lines appear to be almost matching, only small gaps are visible even when sudden changes in power produced occur. As both plots are on a different scale, absolute error might differ for equal gap sizes but the rela tive error is still accurately represented and can be compared through this method. Results 58 Figure 16: Power Forecast of Station 1 - Inverter 7 Figure 17: Power Forecast Composition The results also show that the error metrics do not improve linearly with increasing set -size. While not exactly matching, an exponentially decreasing function Results 59 seems to be fitting, meaning the improvement decreases gradually with each increase of set size.
The fluctuation of the max imum and minimum value of each metric between set-sizes can be explained through the chosen approach of randomly drawing datasets to create a limited number of combinations within each set. The number of samples obtained is extremely small compared to the number of possible combinations.
Therefore, the samples within this set do not accurately reflect the distribution of all possible combinations of the respective set size. But this also highlights that the chance of experiencing a significant improvement w ithin a given error metric increases with an increasing number of individual forecasts, corroborating the importance of this multi -system composition approach. The reason for that is that with increasing number forecasts in the composition not just the cha nce of balanced number of over - and underprediction at every point in time increases, but also each individual forecast has less of a weight. For example, w hen a n individual forecast has a relatively high error at one point in time, then this is compensate d for by all other forecasts within the composition. Nevertheless, the minimum value for each metric over all set sizes, always occurred at a set -size smaller than all forecasts combined. A value for any given metric will be lower the more equally the over- and underpredict ions within the composition are distributed . As the pool of possible combinations within each size is quite large, it basically depends on chance how well the forecasts selected for the composition, do equal each other out.Results 4.3. Battery Capaci ty Simulation The simulation results show that determining the capacity of a BESS with the purpose of compensating forecasting errors can be achieved with a simple constraint of maximum discharge. The prerequisite to do so is a reliable forecast where the maximum errors are consistent and expectable. Beyond simply delivering a capacity estimation for a BESS that reliable compensates for errors, the provided buffer and management policy, ensure reasonable cycle life of the batteries. The sum of charges and d ischarges (or full charge equivalents) appear to be below what is expected for both the Tesla Powerwall 2 and the sonnen eco. As computed in the analysis, the full cycles of the BESS would be just be over 500 a year. As the sonnen ecoโ€™s cycle life is speci fied to 10,000 cycles that would allow for theoretical operation of 20 years, while itโ€™s specified warranty lies at only 10 years , which probably also aligns with its expected lifespan in a residential application . Both battery models tested for simulatio n are able to fulfill all set conditions besides the maximum dis -/charge condition.
This condition though is not a hard condition, meaning not fulfilling it will not break the operation of the BESS. As mentioned earlier exceeding the maximum DoD can cause permanent reduction of the batteryโ€™s capacity. While the relative excess does not seem to be major, n umerically evaluating the exact consequences of a single occasion to the degree present in the conducted simulation is not possible to the best of the auth orโ€™s knowledge . Regardless based on this observation it is most likely beneficial to add some security buffer when estimating the initial size of the battery, e.g., adding an additional 10% to the initial capacity determined through the maximum DoD conditi on, presented in equation (15). Results 61 But while from the viewpoint of reliability, which is the main focus of this research, the models are not distinguishable, an economical comparison of different models would might lead to a different result. The difference in conversion losses is significant even for a period of just two months (about 2,000 W). This is not too surprising at 36 inverters are considered. Presumably this difference could be a major factor when comparing operation cost.
The main drawback of the presented approach is the relative long period of data needed to ensure reliability . The zero -mean adjustment already relies on a split of the data, meaning the simulation can only be run with the second set. But the simulation itself also needs to be validated, meaning it requires two sets of data is well. This also affects the validity of this research, the data used for validation only spans a month. The results are therefore only meaningful under the assumption that the relevant error metrics of the forecasts used will stay consistent throughout time.
5. Conclusion and Discussion The goal of the research to provide a solution to determining battery capacity in such a way that it is capable of fully compensating all forecast errors and thereby indirectly making forecast reliable. Or in other words from the viewpoint of an operator in the bidding market, making the supply from RES plannable ahead in time. As shown even for large array of solar power systems a battery that is many time s3 smaller than the daily output is sufficient to fully compensate all forecasting errors . Beyond simply fulfilling the compensation purpose even the strain on the battery is minimal, as based on the results of simulation a cycle life of around 10,000 cycl es over 20 years could be expected. Notably m ore so than high accuracy, reliability and consistency of the errors is the essential property that the forecast must meet to keep the capacity of the battery small . This is due to the fact that maximum amount o f energy that can be charged or discharged within in a given time (which is directly tied to the size of the error) appears to be driving factor of the required capacity. Doubling of the maximum absolute error does basically results in doubling of the requ ired capacity. The advantages of the approach in regards to the forecast composition (in combination with the zero -mean adjustment) as shown are an effectively reduced mean percentage error, a significant reduction in the height of maximum errors and overa ll a smaller proportion of high errors. Although the reduction of error metrics does not continuously decrease with additionally inputs to the composition, the chance that the composition is effective does continuously improve . Basically, how well the grou p of 3 37,743 W/389 W = 97.03 | Daily Production = 2,340,049 W / 62 days = 37,743 W/day | Capacity = 389W 63 individuals does cancel each other errors out does depend on chance to a degree, but regardless of that it always offers improvement compared to looking at forecasts in isolation. Another benefit of the composition is the reduced need for quality of each individual forecast and thereby reduced time for training and optimization , as a generic approach for model creation as used in this research might already be sufficient .
Whatever the reason might be, systems with forecast that have overall worse performance are compensated through the more well performing systems. The subsequent impact for the battery capacity is a reduction in required capacity , and prolonged life time. Th e lower maximum errors impact the capacity as the maximum occurring charges or discharges are relatively smaller. The overall reduction of the average error and in connection distribution of errors, profits the cycle life, as less charging and discharging in sum occurs. The zero -mean adjustment as used in this research, while suffic iently functional in this case, might not be sophisticated enough for longer periods of data. This issue is in direct connection with another issue, the relatively short period of data used. The whole does not even span full seven months and the test data used for the battery capacity determination does cover just two months. While based on the results, the range of errors seems to be stable and reliable, certainly more data would be beneficial to further corroborate any claims in regards to long -term appli cability of the approach. Further t he presented approach does not consider location of the BESS which could lead to the argument that not all the system in the composition are co-located and as such a single BESS canโ€™t not cover them all or if so, transpor tation losses must be considered. But this could be argued against, as the assumption is that all these systems feed to the same grid, therefore the placement is not relevant. The BESS just must be 64 located with one of the systems in the composition. Whatev er the total mismatch and its origin may be the charging is only provided through the system located with the BESS. The other systems always fully feed their electricity into the grid. As mentioned, this is only true when the different systems feed into th e same grid. Also, in case if the power producing systems that are co -located with the BESS have a failure, they could also not provide charging when necessary. But complete failure of multiple inverters in the case of solar power is unlikely, and if so wo uld also be only temporarily [Green 2012] . 6.
Future Work The presented work provides merely a fundamental idea. From the discussion in last chapter a few potential ideas arise, which could extend this research are followingly provided. Translating the findings into an economic model would be of benefit to a potential operator of such a battery system. Opposite to the upfront cost for capacity, construction and the maintenance cos t, is the cost associated with prediction errors. Underpredicting means underselling in a bidding market, only the agreed upon amount of power can be sold. Overpredicting on the other hand incurs fees, as the too little power is delivered. Potentially , being able to provide set amounts of power reliably, even could improve asking price for the power provided. Beyond that the model could be extended to buy power when buying price is cheaper than selling price at another time and the current capacity of the b attery allows for it. Testing the provided approach with long -term data would help verifying the presented results, as factors like seasonality or time depended changes might affect forecasting performances and critical conditions like maximum DoD could be violated. If so then mechanism for time -dependent retraining or readjustment must be added, ensuring that the performance of the forecast does not deteriorate too strongly over time. It also would help to invent more sophisticated approaches to the zero -mean adjustment which could lead to even higher improvements when utilizing the forecast composition, which in turn reduces the required battery capacity. As mentioned within the results of the forecast composition, it depends of chance how well chosen fore cast within a composition compensate for each other. It 66 might be possible by using a training and testing dataset to find group of forecasts that compensate for each other well consistently throughout time. This would lead to even further improvement of th e error metrics. The condition would be that out of a pool of forecasts, each of them must belong to exactly one group and the combined result of all groups is still better than grouping just all of them together. Finding a solution to transfer results of this approach to other battery systems, would allow to determine battery capacity without the need of collecting and analyzing data. Basically, the goal would to build up BESS as quickly as possible. To do so the shown approach could be first applied to multiple system s and forecasts. Subsequently correlation between the properties of the systems and the results could be analyzed. If a strong correlation is present than potentially the capacity of the BESS could be roughly determined without the need of extensive data. Lastly while factors, like buffer size, have been addressed , but their impact on battery life and performance is not measured. Also, temperature of the battery has not been considered under the assumption that the partial (and with majority relatively small) charges and discharges would not cause issues in this dimension. Certainly, considering the impact of these factors on the cycle life of the battery can lead to more optimal solutions, when viewed in conjunction with an economic model. 67 Bibliography U.
Pode (2015). "Potential of lithium -ion batteries in renewable energy." Renewable Energy 76: 375 -380. EPRI (2011). "Estimating the Cost s and Benefits of the Smart Grid: A Preliminary Estimate of the Investment Requirements and the Resultant Benefits of a Fully Functioning Smart Grid ." Electric Power Research Institute . Green, P.
(2004). "Self -discharge losses in lithium -ion cells." Aerospace and Electronic Systems Magazine, IEEE 19: 19-24. 70 Appendix 1. Forecast Composition โ€“ MAPE Distributions Table 4: Forecast Composition โ€“ MAPE Distributions n forecasts combined MAPE Distribution Maximum (%) Mean (%) Median (%) Minimum (%) 1 10.6931 5.0192 4.4171 3.0663 2 8.6427 3.4691 3.4518 2.3093 3 7.9713 3.2153 2.9547 2.1647 4 7.5357 3.2236 2.7182 2.0251 5 4.2057 2.6797 2.5335 1.9981 6 4.6913 2.5724 2.3868 2.0029 7 3.0218 2.4104 2.4450 1.8464 8 3.1417 2.3331 2.3444 1.8211 9 4.8647 2.3338 2.2539 1.8450 10 4.6717 2.3176 2.1992 1.7920 11 2.6541 2.2167 2.1899 1.8736 12 2.8257 2.1921 2.1851 1.7077 13 3.3880 2.2130 2.1758 1.8532 14 3.0548 2.2157 2.1602 1.7441 15 3.2365 2.1616 2.1354 1.8127 16 2.8014 2.1298 2.0767 1.8206 17 2.4617 2.0546 2.0312 1.8104 18 2.8545 2.0895 2.0789 1.7759 19 2.5266 2.0902 2.0819 1.7879 20 2.4154 2.0663 2.0144 1.8814 21 2.3579 2.0712 2.0594 1.8602 22 2.4303 2.0589 2.0291 1.7996 23 2.4235 2.0620 2.0437 1.8760 71 n forecasts combined MAPE Distribution Maximum (%) Mean (%) Median (%) Minimum (%) 24 2.3912 2.0400 2.0241 1.8081 25 2.2857 1.9940 1.9977 1.8166 26 2.2001 1.9858 1.9694 1.8288 27 2.2528 2.0081 1.9917 1.8323 28 2.2655 2.0002 1.9840 1.8368 29 2.2641 2.0053 2.0004 1.8601 30 2.1236 1.9962 2.0089 1.8660 31 2.1827 1.9935 1.9910 1.8879 32 2.0877 1.9660 1.9574 1.8931 33 2.0770 1.9711 1.9711 1.8974 34 2.0850 1.9764 1.9680 1.9264 35 2.0489 1.9673 1.9636 1.9333 36 1.9614 1.9614 1.9614 1.9614 72 Appendix 2. Forecast Composition โ€“ Maximum PE Distribution Table 5: Forecast Composition โ€“ Maximum PE Distributions n forecasts combined Maximum P E Distribution Maximum (%) Mean (%) Median (%) Minimum (%) 1 17720.9 3005.5 709.7 100.0 2 7731.4 603.3 269.7 83.4 3 7814.8 702.8 234.4 111.2 4 7040.0 908.3 284.0 84.5 5 3195.4 381.3 239.2 83.4 6 3634.9 411.1 271.6 72.6 7 595.7 221.9 193.7 79.1 8 328.5 180.9 174.8 79.9 9 634.6 183.8 154.6 79.6 10 644.3 208.1 187.1 72.5 11 398.5 187.8 169.0 114.0 12 322.0 163.9 162.1 94.9 13 385.2 162.8 150.3 70.2 14 300.4 163.2 151.3 67.0 15 308.6 166.5 163.1 83.4 16 277.5 155.0 149.2 73.7 17 246.1 146.1 143.3 59.0 18 248.8 144.8 127.4 90.5 19 227.1 139.6 119.7 87.6 20 260.1 144.1 140.8 72.6 21 220.8 151.1 151.4 79.8 22 227.5 140.3 135.9 77.2 23 234.6 143.5 150.7 61.4 24 185.7 129.9 119.4 85.6 73 n forecasts combined Maximum P E Distribution Maximum (%) Mean (%) Median (%) Minimum (%) 25 174.1 130.5 133.8 91.6 26 178.0 125.4 123.9 54.2 27 172.3 128.0 131.4 85.4 28 156.9 124.1 129.8 89.9 29 155.8 123.6 128.2 81.0 30 156.1 121.3 125.3 83.9 31 148.8 117.3 119.6 85.5 32 138.1 118.9 120.4 83.7 33 135.3 115.5 119.7 79.5 34 125.2 112.8 115.4 82.9 35 123.1 111.2 112.2 87.5 36 110.3 110.3 110.3 110.3 Appen dix 3. Forecast Composition โ€“ Share PE over 5% Table 6: Forecast Composition โ€“ Distribution of PE over 5% n forecasts combined Share PE over 5% Maximum (%) Mean (%) Median (%) Minimum (%) 1 11.30% 14.31% 14.31% 17.00% 2 8.33% 11.27% 10.84% 15.22% 3 7.36% 10.29% 10.25% 14.21% 4 7.20% 9.38% 9.48% 11.65% 5 7.78% 9.44% 9.43% 11.68% 6 7.38% 8.90% 8.82% 11.29% 7 7.12% 8.72% 8.55% 11.21% 8 7.34% 8.59% 8.51% 10.42% 9 6.98% 8.55% 8.39% 10.92% 10 7.34% 8.27% 8.01% 10.29% 11 6.91% 8.15% 8.06% 9.94% 12 6.98% 8.00% 7.86% 10.07% 13 6.96% 7.91% 7.93% 8.96% 14 7.13% 8.12% 7.98% 9.40% 15 6.97% 7.96% 7.99% 9.32% 16 6.82% 7.69% 7.64% 9.09% 17 6.92% 7.75% 7.73% 9.26% 18 6.86% 7.74% 7.68% 9.01% 19 6.74% 7.76% 7.74% 9.40% 20 6.86% 7.78% 7.72% 9.05% 21 7.15% 7.77% 7.68% 8.83% 22 6.89% 7.67% 7.57% 9.03% 75 n forecasts combined Share PE over 5% Maximum (%) Mean (%) Median (%) Minimum (%) 23 7.04% 7.72% 7.58% 8.58% 24 6.80% 7.63% 7.55% 8.73% 25 6.94% 7.53% 7.53% 8.74% 26 7.07% 7.57% 7.50% 8.15% 27 7.04% 7.60% 7.62% 8.34% 28 7.19% 7.57% 7.56% 8.01% 29 7.02% 7.46% 7.42% 8.46% 30 7.03% 7.51% 7.54% 8.01% 31 7.19% 7.47% 7.47% 7.90% 32 7.14% 7.52% 7.50% 8.05% 33 7.11% 7.41% 7.38% 7.97% 34 7.16% 7.45% 7.40% 7.91% 35 7.22% 7.37% 7.35% 7.70% 36 7.35% 7.35% 7.35% 7.35%